SAS is one of the most popular open-source treasures from around the world. It is a powerful statistical software used for various data analysis tasks. With its wide range of features, SAS allows users to easily and effectively manage and analyse their data.
In this article, we will discuss some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of SAS:
What is SAS?
SAS (Statistical Analysis System) is a software suite developed by SAS Institute for advanced analytics, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics. It is an integrated system that enables users to convert raw data into knowledge for making better decisions.
The software package enables you to access and analyse large amounts of data using statistical methods, including:
- Basic descriptive statistics
- Hypothesis testing
- Cluster analysis
- Regression analysis
- Time-series analysis
- And more.
SAS can help users in virtually any industry become more competitive because they can analyse their data quickly and accurately. Its user-friendly interface allows even those without programming experience to glean insights from their data efficiently and effectively. In addition, SAS offers powerful tools to quickly approach business problems with effective solutions.
What are the benefits of using SAS?
The SAS programming language is an incredibly powerful tool for data analysis. It has various uses, from analysing historical data to predictive analytics and forecasting. It can easily import and export databases from various sources, allowing for the efficient transfer of information across different platforms. Additionally, its simple commands are intuitive and its flexibility allows for developing complex algorithms.
In addition to the practical benefits of using SAS, the language has been used for decades by many organisations worldwide. This increased usage has led to robust support from user groups that offer webinars, tips-and-tricks guides, online manual pages, tutorials, sample programs and more. By having access to these resources at any time, beginners just starting with coding in SAS can easily learn more about how it works and how to make it work better.
Beyond these minor considerations, though, is that learning how to code with SAS can open up career opportunities and expand job horizons largely because so many organisations rely on it as their go-to software package when dealing with their data sets. Companies want professionals who understand how to optimise existing processes in addition to being able to craft unique solutions when needed – with proficiency comes possibilities and credentials related to SAS development allow folks looking for a new role or opportunity show off a wide range of skills which would be beneficial in a corporate or other position where understanding numerical data is important.
SAS Open-source Treasures from Around The World
From open-source treasures by data scientists around the world to SAS tips and tricks, a wealth of resources are available to make the most of your SAS work. Knowing the right SAS sources to leverage can help you gain insights, develop skills, and get the most out of your data.
In this section, we’ll look at a few SAS resources that you can use to increase your SAS prowess:
SAS Tutorials
Learning SAS is one of the most rewarding experiences for people in the data science and analytics fields. With SAS, you can import data from databases, shapes and files, apply business rules to the data, then efficiently analyse and report on the results. However, with such a powerful tool, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin.
Fortunately, plenty of online resources offer free tutorials on how to use SAS. By leveraging these free tutorials, you will be able to learn the basics of programming in SAS while also discovering more advanced topics such as managing large datasets and using various proc functions.
Below is an overview of some of the most popular free tutorials related to learning SAS:
- SAS Tutorial for Beginners by Online Web Tutor
- SAS Academy for Data Science provides courses covering beginner through advanced levels
- Statistical Analysis System (SAS ) Tutorials by Tutorialspoint
- SAS Programming Resources from University of California San Diego
- SAS Programming Language Online Training from MindMajix
- Data Analysis with SAS by edX
- Introduction To Statistical Analysis Using The SAS System by Stanford Lagunita
SAS Communities and Forums
The SAS Communities and Forums provide a platform for users to find the support and information they need. The communities, blogs and forums can be used to ask questions, post code snippets and join discussions with peers or experts.
The SAS user community is an expanding network of over 36,000 members who collaborate to exchange new ideas and share best practices. This user engagement platform allows members to connect across organisational boundaries, discover answers quickly and stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the SAS industry. Members can leverage the full power of SAS communities by joining thematic groups, using question forums or reading blog posts written by experienced users.
Additionally, the interactive discussion forums supplied by SAS are a great resource for all SAS users – from beginners who are just starting to learn code to experts with more experience in data analytics. Finally, those users looking for practical help with programming questions can find both general advice and specific assistance throughout most threads, ensuring problems are solved quickly yet effectively.
SAS Open-Source Treasures from Around the World
The open-source world has many SAS related projects that can be used to enhance your SAS skills as well as to help make programming easier and more efficient. Here are some of the best tools available across the globe that you can use to sharpen up your SAS skills:
European Resources:
- Euromapy is a web-based mapping system created by the European Space Agency that enables users to view data on a map. It allows for complex geographic queries, such as accessing administrative units, calculating distances, areas and surface elevations. Euro Mapy helps bring analyses to life in interactive maps with detailed information about any area of interest in Europe.
- StatPages is an open source apache server development tool used for creating dynamic web pages from SAS programs. It makes it easy to create user interfaces using HTML forms with selectable plot types, plots generated according to user-selectable settings and statistical output associated with plot output. StatPages also has an extensive library of downloadable sample SAS programs, allowing users to familiarise themselves with the tool’s features before taking it out into a larger system or platform.
Asia Pacific Resources:
- SAS Bot is a chatbot platform that provides online analytics with decision support capabilities. It allows users in Asia Pacific to interact through natural language processing and unstructured dialogue systems such as Skype or other instant messaging protocols. The bot utilises statistical models built by its creators at Singapore Management University (SMU) so that users can identify patterns in data quickly and effectively from different datasets available from numerous sources around the region.
- NK-SAS is an innovative open-source project developed in North Korea for market analysts interested in looking at trading data and performance metrics associated with campaigns and multi-product portfolios within their country’s economy sector. NK-SAS provides an array of flexible analysis tools allowing users to transform raw data into visually attractive charts and reports while embracing the creative analytical approach needed when developing business insights specific to this particular economic environment.
Tips and Tricks
SAS is an open-source statistical tool used in data analysis and business intelligence. However, its capabilities don’t end there. There are a ton of tips and tricks that can be used to take your SAS skills to the next level.
This article will explore some of the lesser-known SAS open-source treasures worldwide. Then, we’ll cover some unique ways to get the most out of the tool and utilise it to its full potential.
How to Use the SAS System
SAS is a comprehensive statistical software package that is both powerful and versatile. While it can be complex, with a bit of practice, anyone can learn how to use the software and make the most of it. Here are some basic steps to get you started.
- Become familiar with the SAS language. This can be achieved by online tutorials or reading up on SAS programming books. To gain best results in working with data on the SAS platform, familiarity with base SAS syntax and procedures is essential.
- Learn about data types and variable storage rules. In addition to numeric values, variables in the SAS system may store both character strings and dates, which have specific features associated with them. Understanding this helps you avoid common errors when loading your data files into the system and determine how best to organise variables for analysis.
- Write a program that will read in a set of values from your data file using unstructured text files or Excel spreadsheets into an appropriate format that complies with the SAS environment’s coding structures and conventions.
- Begin using more advanced procedures such as PROC FREQ to generate frequency tables based on categorical variables; PROC MEANS for computing descriptive statistics; or PROC CORR for producing correlation matrices. Additional tools such as ODS (Output Delivery System) allow your results from these various programs to be easily exported/saved as formatted HTML or PDF documents.
- Ensure that each program line of your code is tested for accuracy and verified before running it on your entire dataset—this helps avoid any errors being passed down further into subsequent parts of an analysis project. Doing so also allows any previous results from an earlier run of commands (e.g descriptive statistics) to remain intact resulting in fewer replications of lengthy processes when redoing similar tasks again later on down the line.
How to Automate Tasks in SAS
In today’s data-driven environment, finding ways to automate repetitive tasks is essential. One of the best ways to do this is with SAS, a programming language well-suited for managing large amounts of data and automating tasks.
While automated tasks are extremely useful, they can be unfamiliar and difficult to set up if you don’t have the right knowledge or tools.
Fortunately, SAS provides many helpful tools that make automation easier. Here are some tips and tricks for making the best use of these tools when automating tasks in SAS:
- Determine the goal: Take stock of what needs to be done before trying to program anything – this will help ensure you focus on creating code that solves your specific problem efficiently.
- Utilise macros & proc SQL: SAS contains powerful programs like macros and Proc SQL which can automate very complex tasks in relatively little time. Learn how to use them!
- Use modules & methods provided by SAS: Many task automation programs are included as part of SAS like Proc Datasets and Data Step processing methods into several existing procedures where available. These modules can be used quickly and easily as needed or modified according to specific requirements.
- Maximise loops & arrays: Loops and arrays are essential for task automation because they allow large data sets or multiple steps in a process to be executed quickly by looping through predefined structures such as “for each step” instead of individually coding out each one.
- Monitor system usage: Track how often individual processes are run within your system so that you can identify any areas where efficiency could be improved by automating them with a macro or proc SQL functions instead of performing manual workarounds that take more time.
How to Create Reports and Graphs with SAS
Creating reports and graphs using SAS is more than just copying and pasting; it requires knowledge of the programming language and specific tools and techniques to properly display data. These tips make it easy to create high-quality graphical output:
- Use ODS RTF (Rich Text Format) or ODS HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) destinations in your program – these offer the highest quality output when integrated into documents.
- Use PROC TEMPLATE to generate custom tables & graphs with a consistent look throughout your report with minimal effort.
- Make sure to include all necessary format statements in your program for numbers, dates, currency etc., are accurately displayed according to the locale.
- Use Graph Template Language (GTL) for producing high-quality graphics with dynamic data from real-world applications.
- Include annotation labels whenever you use SAS/GRAPH or GTL that tell the viewers important information like axes titles or statistics.
- Customise graph palettes by making them colorblind friendly, monochromatic, or accentuated for a specific audience.
- Know which procedures you use for what kind of report output – not all procedures are created equal! Examples include PROC REPORT, PROC TABULATE, and PROC FREQ for tables; Proc SGPLOT and Proc SGPANEL for basic plots; PROC GCHART & G3D for Pie Charts & 3D plots respectively; SAS/GRAPH provides access many different types of specialised statistical graphics such as maps, boxplots etc.; GTL is recommended when you need sophisticated visualisation capabilities such as stacked bars/clustered bars/subgroups etc.
- Consider utilising ODS Graphics Designer to modify graphical attributes interactively without having to write much code. All graphical element attributes can be changed even after the graph has already been produced!
Conclusion
In conclusion, SAS can be a powerful tool when used properly, and there are multiple ways to take advantage of open-source treasures from around the world to get the most out of SAS. With so many interesting and useful tips, tricks, and functions being posted online, we hope this article has served as a guide for you to discover some of the more niche features you can use to get the most out of your SAS experience.
Summary of Benefits of Using SAS
SAS technology is an incredibly powerful tool that allows data manipulation to provide insights that improve mission-critical decisions, optimise operational performance and facilitate growth initiatives.
Using SAS allows businesses to access their data quickly and efficiently by leveraging the scalability of a cloud environment. This helps to significantly reduce storage and computing costs while improving performance. SAS also eliminates redundant processes thanks to its integrated products which can quickly perform automated tasks with minimal manual interventions.
In addition, businesses can benefit from the use of analytics tools provided by SAS. These tools enable organisations to test hypotheses quickly using interactive visualisations and statistical methods, so they can measure predictions against actual outcomes. This gives organisations tangible insights about their current strategies to optimise efficiency or invest in greater growth opportunities.
SAS technology also offers a range of automation capabilities such as speech recognition output and automated report generation which can help streamline processes and enhance accuracy in report development. Furthermore, its ability to integrate with other systems helps promote collaboration across departments resulting in greater corporate visibility on strategic business goals. All these benefits demonstrate why utilising SAS solutions makes good business sense for organisations struggling with large data sets across multiple departments or locations.
How to Get Started with SAS
SAS is an incredibly powerful programming language and tools that allow users to store, manipulate and analyse data. Learning to use SAS can be a real investment in your professional development, but it isn’t as intimidating as it may initially seem.
To get started with SAS, begin with basic commands, familiarise yourself with the IDE (Integrated Development Environment), and apply SAS programming loops:
- Start with Basic Commands: The most basic SAS commands are shallow; they only require defining a few parameters or input values. Learn these commands first, such as the Data Step command that allows you to create datasets in the IDE or PROC SQL for Structured Query Language (SQL).
- Familiarise Yourself with the IDE: Once you have a basic understanding of SAS commands, you can start using them in your choice’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) interface. Beginner users should use Base SAS since it has an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). Other interfaces include Enterprise Miner for predictive modellers and Enterprise Guide for report writers.
- Apply Programming Loops: Once you become more comfortable using SAS programming commands individually in the IDE environment, you can apply loops to improve your ability to program larger tasks more quickly and efficiently. For example, practice creating a Do Loop that will run through several observations at once or creating an IF THEN ELSE statement which allows users to run different calculations based on certain criteria being met or not being met within a specific observation set structure.
tags = multinational developer of analytics software, sas institute american company, sas analytics, sas artificial intelligence, sas data management, open source treasures, provides vast functionality, SAS ecosystem, open-source code, data management software and services, broadcom sas 15b 20bstreetjournal, markets analytics software, access, manage, analyze and report on data to aid in decision-making
