Fundamentals - the Language of SAS

Introductions to SAS Programming (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Explain what the Language of SAS is used for and by whom.

• Explanation about SAS and who uses it
• Data Access
• Data Management
• Data Analysis
• Data Presentation

Basic Concepts (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Explain how the Language of SAS is used to access, manage, analyse and present data.

• What is a dataset, a database and a relational database?
• Libraries, LIBREFS, LIBNAME statement
• Referencing a dataset
• The Data Step procedure
• Basic Procedures including PROC MEANS and PROC PRINT

Investigating SAS Datasets (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Define how to investigate datasets in the Language of SAS using two types of Procedure.

• The PRINT procedure
• Metadata, the CONTENTS procedure
• Types of data

Programming Concepts (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Describe the key programming concepts within the Language of SAS.

• Program components – Data Steps and Procedures
• Programming language is made up of statements, expressions, functions & call routines, options, formats, and informats
• Managing Syntax errors
• Naming conventions

DATA STEP Processing (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Explain how the two phases of Data Step Processing work to create new datasets and variables.

• Data Step syntax: The DATA and SET Statements
• Creating Datasets
• Creating Variables
• Data Step processing, i.e. what goes on in the background when you submit your data step code.

Selecting Variables and Observations (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Define Variables and Observations to be read from and written to datasets.

• KEEPing and DROPing Variables
• The IF Statement
• The WHERE Statement
• FIRSTOBS= and OBS=
• IS NULL or IS MISSING
• BETWEEN-AND
• CONTAINS (?) and SOUNDS LIKE (=*)

Introduction to Functions (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Describe how functions are used to transform Numeric, Date and Character values.

• SUM and MEAN functions for numerics
• TODAY(), MDY, DAY, WEEKDAY, WEEK, MONTH, QTR and YEAR
• UPCASE, LOWCASE and SUBSTR functions for character values

IF THEN ELSE Processing (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Apply conditional logic to assign values to variables and to control which observations are written to multiple output datasets.

• IF-THEN-ELSE syntax
• DO-END syntax
• The LENGTH statement
• The OUTPUT statement
• The DELETE statement

System Formats (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Describe how formats can be used to change the displayed values of Character, Numeric and Date variables.

• System supplied formats
• $w. simple character
• w.d, COMMAw.d, NLMNYw.d numeric and currency formats
• DATEw. and DDMMYYw. date formats

Sorting data with PROC SORT (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Use the Sort Procedure to re-order observations in a dataset, remove duplicate data and create an output dataset.

• PROC SORT syntax
• Using BY and NODUPKEY to remove duplicates
• The OUT= option

Combining Datasets VERTICALLY (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Explain the three methods which can be used to combine datasets together vertically.

• Concatenate multiple datasets
  
• Append one dataset to another
• Interleave multiple datasets

Combining Datasets HORIZONTALLY (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Describe how datasets can be combined together horizontally or merged including matches and non-matches.

• One-to-One merging
• Match merging
• One-to-Many merging
• Selecting matches and non-matches
• Introduction to Proc SQL joins

Frequency Counts with PROC FREQ (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Use the Freq Procedure to generate frequency counts and percentages of data values within a dataset.

• One-way frequencies
• Two-way frequencies
• Create an output dataset

Summary Statistics with PROC MEANS (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Use the Means Procedure to calculate summary statistics within a dataset, selecting classification and analysis variables.

• PROC MEANS syntax
• CLASS and VAR statements
• Specifying Statistic keywords
• Create an output dataset

Summary Tables with PROC TABULATE (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Use the Tabulate Procedure to calculate summary statistics in one, two and three dimension tabular form.

• PROC TABULATE syntax
• CLASS and VAR statements
• Define table content – TABLE statement
• Produce multiple output tables

Analysing Values with PROC UNIVARIATE (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Describe the 5 default statistical tables produced by the Univariate Procedure and the options available to modify the output.

• PROC UNIVARIATE syntax
• CLASS and VAR statements
• ID statement and Options

List Reports with PROC PRINT (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Create customised list reports with the Print Procedure.

• Select variables and observations
• Creating and using variable labels
• Adding titles and footnotes
• Grouping observations
• Calculating totals and sub-totals

Reading from and writing to Non-SAS Files (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Explain three methods which can be used to read from or write to non-SAS Files including delimited raw data and Excel files.

• Using Data Step syntax to read and write raw data
• Access Excel workbooks using the XLSX engine
• Creating output files with Proc Export

Error handling and Debugging (Live Online Class)

Learning Objective: Writing and running SAS programs is often not successful on the first attempt so it’s important to be able to read and understand Log messages.

• NOTES, WARNINGS and ERRORS
• Making sense of common error messages
• Methods for finding and correcting errors
• Testing your code
• Debugging your code