SAS Tutorial — Introduction

Getting Started
SAS-in-a-Nutshell

SAS is an integrated system of software products for managing and analyzing data. It enables you to perform data entry, retrieval, and management; report writing and graphics design; statistical and mathematical analysis; business forecasting and decision support; operations research and project management; and applications development.

This hands-on tutorial will familiarize you with the basics of using SAS on UNIX/Linux. You must have an ITS computing account, a basic familiarity with the UNIX/Linux operating system, and knowledge of a Linux editor such as Pico. If you are not familiar with the use of UNIX/Linux, you will want to look at the Introduction to UNIX available online. To log in to Linux, you may use any of the public computers in the ITS Pods around campus, or you may dial in using ITS' dial-up lines or use your exisitng alternative ISP connection at home.

Getting Started

The SAS system can be run in either of two modes: interactive mode or noninteractive mode. This tutorial will be conducted in noninteractive mode. This means that we will first discuss concepts, then you will go to your Linux session and type in a SAS program and run it. You will review the output from your job, editing your program to correct errors, if necessary. Then you will come back to this tutorial, where we will discuss new material. We will follow this format through five exercises. There will be a brief discussion at the end of this tutorial about running SAS interactively on Linux. For a more detailed discussion, see the section of the Introduction to UNIX document called (SAS).

ToC

SAS-in-a-Nutshell

In order to use SAS it is necessary that you become acquainted with the vocabulary or language. SAS is a quasinatural language used to describe data and data analysis procedures.

A SAS program consists of a series of DATA, data transformation and PROCedure statements. The beginning SAS user will know how to use the following SAS statements upon completion of this tutorial.

1. DATA;

2. INPUT;

3. CARDS;

4. ; (semicolon)

5. TITLE;

6. PROC PRINT;

7. PROC FREQ;

8. LABEL;

9. PROC MEANS;

10. PROC UNIVARIATE;

11. PROC PLOT;

12. PROC FORMAT;

13. IF / THEN; ELSE;

14. SET;

15. IF;

16. SORT;

ToC