Introduction

Welcome to the quick-start guide! We hope you'll find a lot of useful information here to get
you programming in SAS right away.

This section of the quick-start guide gives you a brief introduction to SAS. Then you'll get
hands-on experience as you go through the guide and experiment with sample SAS
programs. At the end of the guide, you'll find information about other SAS features--be sure to
see Additional base SAS capabilities and SAS solutions.

This overview of SAS focuses primarily on base SAS, which is the core foundation for a
variety of data management and analytical software components offered by SAS.

Base SAS: The Big Picture

Base SAS provides you with essential tools for the basic data-driven tasks that you commonly
perform as a programmer:

 data access
 management
 analysis
 presentation.

You can use the SAS programming language, ready-to-use procedures, and the
windowing interface to

 access data from many sources

 manage your data
 analyze your data and present it as meaningful information in a report that you can
deliver to any platform, in any format you need.
Examples

With SAS, you can join Oracle data on a mainframe computer with an existing SAS data set,
create new variables (columns), and produce an interactive graph on your PC.

Or, you can read raw data on a UNIX server, recompute data values, compute statistics, and
create an HTML report. This report can be stored on a web server, so that anyone in your
organization can view it.

Accessing Data

You've seen that you can access data using SAS regardless of the data sources or platforms
on which it resides. That is, you can access data

 that is stored almost anywhere, whether it is in a file on your system, or data that is
stored on a remote server or in another database system.

 in almost any format, including raw data, SAS data sets, and files created by other
vendors' software.

Types of Files You Can Access

You can read raw data in any format, from any kind of file, including variable-length records,
binary files, free-formatted data--even files with messy or missing data.

You can access some other vendors' files directly, including BMDP, SPSS, and OSIRIS files.
For others, you can use SAS/ACCESS to access external data as if it were native to SAS. For
example, you can read data stored in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, in a Microsoft Access
table, in a dBASE file, or in ORACLE or another DBMS.

SAS/ACCESS provides access to these types of files:

Relational databases

DB2 under OS/390 Informix Oracle Rdb

DB2 under VM ODBC SYBASE
DB2 under UNIX or PC OLE DB MS SQL Server
CA-OpenIngres ORACLE Teradata

Non-relational databases and other data sources

ADABAS CA- PC File Formats

CA-DATACOM/DB IDMS SYSTEM 2000 software
IMS-DL/I

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems

Baan R/3
PeopleSoft SAP BW
Managing Data

After you've accessed your data, you can use the SAS programming language to manipulate
it any way you choose.

For example, you can

 format your data

 create variables (columns)

 use operators to evaluate data values

 use functions to create and recode data values

 subset data

 perform conditional processing

 merge a wide range of data sources

 create, retrieve, and update database information.

 Analyzing Data and Presenting Information

Once your data is in shape, you can use SAS to analyze data and produce reports. Your SAS
output can range from a simple listing of a data set to customized reports of complex
relationships.

Analysis

Base SAS provides powerful data analysis tools. For example, you can

 produce tables, frequency counts, and cross-tabulation tables

 create a variety of charts and plots

 compute a variety of descriptive statistics, including the mean, sum, variance,

standard deviation and more

 compute correlations and other measures of association, as well as multi-way cross-

tabulations and inferential statistics.

Presentation

For reporting and displaying analytical results, SAS gives you an almost limitless number of
visually appealing output formats, such as

 an array of markup languages including HTML4 and XML

 output that is formatted for a high-resolution printer, such PostScript, PDF, and PCL
files
 RTF
 color graphs that you can make interactive using ActiveX controls or Java applets.

Finally, you can output these reports to a wide variety of locations and platforms in order to
suit your needs.

 Explore the SAS workspace

Overview

SAS is designed to be easy to use. It provides windows for accomplishing all the basic SAS
tasks you need to do. Once you get familiar with the starting points for your SAS tasks, you
are ready to accomplish any task that SAS can do.

When you first start SAS, the five main SAS windows open: the Explorer, Results, Program
Editor or Editor, Log, and Output windows.

This quick walkthrough shows you how each of these windows is used.

View the Explorer window

In the Explorer window, you can view and manage your SAS files and create shortcuts to files
that are not formatted by SAS. Use this window to

 create new SAS libraries and SAS files

 open any SAS file
 perform most file management tasks such as moving, copying, and deleting files
 create file shortcuts.

You can choose to display the Explorer window with or without a tree view of its contents.
View the Editor window

You can use either of these windows to enter, edit, and submit SAS programs:

 the Program Editor window, which is available on all SAS platforms

 the Editor window, which is available only in the Windows operating environment.

The Editor window provides a number of useful editing features, including

 color coding and syntax checking of SAS language

 expandable and collapsible sections
 recordable macros
 support for keyboard shortcuts (Alt or Shift plus keystroke)
 multilevel undo and redo

and much more.

 The initial Editor window title is Editor - Untitledn. When you open a file or save the contents
of the Editor window to a file, the window title changes to reflect that file name. When the
contents of the Editor window are modified, an asterisk is added to the title.

You can have multiple Editor windows open at the same time.

View the Log window

The Log window displays messages about your SAS session and any SAS programs that you submit.

View the Output window

The Output window displays the output from SAS programs that you submit. It automatically opens or
moves to the front of your display when you create output.

Not all SAS programs create output in the Output window. Some programs open interactive windows.
Other programs only produce messages in the Log window. If you create HTML output, you can view
it in the Results Viewer window, which is the internal browser for SAS.

View the Results window

The Results window helps you navigate and manage output from SAS programs that you submit. You
can view, save, and print individual items of output. (Recall that the Results Viewer window is the
where you actually view HTML output.)

The Results window is empty until you submit a SAS program that creates output. Then it opens or
moves to the front of your display.

View the Solutions and Tools menus

Along with windows for working with your SAS files and SAS programs, SAS provides a set of ready-
to-use solutions, applications, and tools. You can access many of these tools by using the Solutions
and Tools menus.