Book Image

Hands-On SAS for Data Analysis

By : Harish Gulati
Book Image

Hands-On SAS for Data Analysis

By: Harish Gulati

Overview of this book

SAS is one of the leading enterprise tools in the world today when it comes to data management and analysis. It enables the fast and easy processing of data and helps you gain valuable business insights for effective decision-making. This book will serve as a comprehensive guide that will prepare you for the SAS certification exam. After a quick overview of the SAS architecture and components, the book will take you through the different approaches to importing and reading data from different sources using SAS. You will then cover SAS Base and 4GL, understanding data management and analysis, along with exploring SAS functions for data manipulation and transformation. Next, you'll discover SQL procedures and get up to speed on creating and validating queries. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn all about data visualization, right from creating bar charts and sample geographic maps through to assigning patterns and formats. In addition to this, the book will focus on macro programming and its advanced aspects. By the end of this book, you will be well versed in SAS programming and have the skills you need to easily handle and manage your data-related problems in SAS.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: SAS Basics
4
Section 2: Merging, Optimizing, and Descriptive Statistics
7
Section 3: Advanced Programming
10
Section 4: SQL in SAS
13
Section 5: Data Visualization and Reporting

MACRO and NOMACRO

Most users will have never heard of an option that turns off macro processing in SAS. These users will even question the need for doing that. However, if you are running large processes that take a long time to complete, you will benefit from specifying the NOMACRO option. It prevents SAS from recognizing and processing macro language statements, macro calls, and macro variable references. In general, the item isn't recognized, and an error message is issued. If the macro facility is not used in a job, a small performance gain can be made by setting NOMACRO because there is no overhead when it comes to checking for macros or macro variables.

When I tried the NOMACRO option in SAS University Edition, I got the following error:

OPTIONS NOMACRO;
_______
11
WARNING 11-12: SAS option MACRO is valid only at startup of the SAS...