The purposes of this sequence of documents is to provide guidelines for understanding basics of using SAS and to show many helpful hints or hidden features that will assist you to use it more effectively for data analysis. Before you begin, you'll need some familiarity with DOS, VMS, or UNIX systems including how to edit, copy, delete, transfer, and retrieve data files in subdirectories. Actually, SAS can more appropriately be described as a Data Delivery and Analysis System so it is not correct to categorize it as a programming 'language'. They embrace modules for statistical analysis, spreadsheets, CBT, presentation graphics, project management, operations research, scheduling, linear programming, quality control, econometrics, to name only a few. Overall, SAS is much more comprehensive than many other programs and actually not as difficult to learn as you may expect.
Sophisticated tools are available for data manipulation, and to import or export.
Learning SAS is a good investment for gaining readiness for future projects. In other words, with SAS you can analyze data the same way it was collected. SAS performs virtually all standard data analysis tasks. Types of Files Commonly Used A very easy way to run SAS jobs is to store commands in program files and then pass those files to SAS via batch processing. Permanent SAS data sets created with the DATA step on a PC now have the names of either .sd7 or .sas7bdat.