(1) SAS I - Introduction to the SAS System – 3/13/06 – 3/15/06

The Audience:

This course is intended for two groups of students : those who are brand new to the SAS System, and those who have been using the SAS System for a few years, but want to fill in the ‘gaps’ in their SAS knowledge.

The Course Format:

The course is mostly lecture with some time for exercises, demonstrations, and working on problems students bring to class. The exercises at the end of most chapters use data sets shipped with the SAS system. Students can also work through the exercises at their own pace after the conclusion of the course. This course can be taught as a public course or as an on-site course. Comprehensive textbooks for students are included in the course fee.

The Benefits:

Students who take this course will learn a lot about the SAS System and its internal workings. This understanding will help the student to write more efficient programs. Specifically, students will learn how to manipulate the SAS System to read non SAS files, manipulate data, summarize data, and generate a number of different kinds of reports.

Course Contents:

Day 1: 8:00 am - 4:30 pm

1. Getting Started

Features and Basic concepts; the SAS environment - running SAS interactively; Program flow; Syntax rules; SAS Files – structure of a SAS dataset.

2. Writing and Submitting SAS Programs

An in depth look at the DATA Step – basic statements, compiling, and executing; SAS date values – how to read and write them (no year 2000 conversion problem here); step by step approach to submitting the program; handling errors at compile and execution time; how the SAS System accesses non-SAS data; Exercises.

3. Creating Simple Reports

An introduction to the PROC step – processing the dataset; generating list reports – the options and the statements available; sorting the dataset – options and statements available; An in-depth look is given to PROC PRINT and PROC SORT. This chapter ends with a quick look at storing SAS data sets permanently.

Day 2: 8:00 am - 4:30 pm

4. Simple Data Manipulation

Creating new variables; SAS Functions; Using If-Then logic; Using DO groups; reading SAS datasets; controlling the content of the SAS dataset; Exercises.

5. Generating Statistical Reports

Descriptive statistics – min, max, mean, n, sum, kurtosis, standard deviation ,t, corrected sum of the squares, uncorrected sum of the squares, covariance, frequency counts, median, quartiles, percentiles. An in-depth look is given to PROC MEANS and PROC UNIVARIATE. Exercises.

6. Combining SAS Datasets

Managing, concatenating, merging, and updating SAS datasets; Exercises.

Day 3: 8:00 am - 3:30 pm

7 An Advanced Look at Reports

What is a report; Types of Reports generated with SAS, Report Writing options.

8 Writing Detail Reports

An in depth look at the PRINT procedure; Utility procedures for enhancing reports; Writing reports with the DATA step; Exercises.

9. Summary Reports

An introduction to summarizing data; summary procedures; Using the
FREQ procedure; Using the MEANS/SUMMARY procedure; Proc FREQ, Generating summary reports with the REPORT procedure; Summarizing data with the TABULATE procedure; the chapter ends with a quick look at ODS; Exercises