FastTrack Base Certification - the Language of SAS

FastTrack Base Certification (Part 1)

Introduction 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
• Comparison and Logical Operators
• FIRSTOBS= and OBS=
• Special WHERE operators

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 - horizontally or merged including matches and non-matches.

• One-to-One 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
• N-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
 

FastTrack Base Certification (Part 2)

Character Functions (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Describe how functions are used to perform character transformation including:

SUBSTR, SCAN, TRIM, COMPRESS, LEFT, RIGHT, CATX, INDEX, FIND, UPCASE, LOWCASE, PROPCASE and TRANWRD

Numeric Functions (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Describe how functions are used to perform numeric transformation including:

SUM, MEAN, MIN, MAX, ROUND, CEIL, FLOOR, INT

Date Functions (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Describe how functions are used to perform date transformation including:

TODAY, DATE, MDY, DAY, MONTH, YEAR, WEEKDAY, QTR, TIME / DATETIME, TIMEPART / DATEPART, INTCK / INTNX, YRDIF / DATDIF

Changing Data Types Using Functions (live online class)

Learning Objective: Describe how functions are used to change variable type

• Automatic character to numeric conversion
• INPUT Function to convert character values to numeric
• Automatic numeric to character conversion
• PUT Function to convert numeric values to character

Summarising Observations and Variables (live online class)

Learning Objective: Describe how to use the Data Step to summarise variables and observations using:

• RETAIN statement
• SUM Statement
• BY-Group processing

Iterative Processing (live online class)

Learning Objective: Describe how to iterative and conditional loops to iterate multiple times within a Data Step and manipulate your dataset structures:

• Create and execute DO Loops
• Conditional processing with DO UNTIL and DO WHILE
• Combine Iterative and Conditional DO Loops
 

Array Processing (live online class)

Learning Objective: Describe how to use arrays within a Data Step to temporarily link variables across observation

• Define an Array
• Use Array References
• Using Arrays with DO loops, to perform repetitive actions and to store temporary and existing variables

Transposing Data (live online class)

Learning Objective: Describe how to use a Data Step and the Transpose procedure to transpose data tables:

• Using Conditional Logic in a DATA Step
• Using PROC TRANSPOSE

User Defined Formats with PROC FORMAT (live online class)

Learning Objective: Describe how to use the Format procedure to create and save user-specific formats for use:

• Apply formats to your data
• Create your own formats and apply them to your data
• Create a format with data from a dataset

Output Delivery System (live online class)

Learning Objective: Describe the Output Delivery System (ODS) and some of the ODS destinations

• The Output Delivery System (ODS)
• Control output to ODS destinations
• Create Datasets from Procedures

Introduction to Macro processing (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Explain basic Macro Processing in the Language of SAS.

• Compilation and Execution phases
• Tokenization
• Macro Triggers
• The %PUT Statement
• Displaying macro variable values

Introduction to Macro variables (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Describe six different features of Macro Variables.

• Macro Variable Storage
• Macro Variable Resolution
• User-Defined Macro Variables
• The %LET Statement
• The SYMBOLGEN Option
• Delimiting Macro Variables
 

Macro Functions (eLearning)

Learning Objective: Identify three different types of Macro Functions.

• Character Functions – review
• Using Macro Functions
• Macro Functions for Numbers
• The %SYSFUNC and other functions including: %INDEX, %SCAN, %SUBSTR, %UPCASE, %BQUOTE, %STR, %NRBQUOTE, %NRSTR, %EVAL and % SYSEVALF.