SAS (Statistical Analytical System) was developed to analyze the Agricultural data for United States Department of Agriculture in 1966
SAS is a set of solutions for enterprise-wide business users and provides a powerful fourth generation programming language for performing tasks such as these:
–Data entry, retrieval, and management
–Report writing and graphics
–Statistical and mathematical analysis
–Business planning, forecasting, and decision support
–Operations research and project management
–Quality improvement
–Applications development
With Base SAS software as the foundation, user can integrate SAS with many business solutions that enable user to perform large scale business functions, such as data warehousing and data mining, human resources management and decision support, financial management and decision support, and others
SAS is a software suite that can mine, alter, manage and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it. SAS provides a graphical point-and-click user interface for non-technical users and more advanced options through the SAS language.
SAS programs have DATA steps, which retrieve and manipulate data, and PROC steps, which analyze the data. Each step consists of a series of statements.
The DATA step has executable statements that result in the software taking an action, and declarative statements that provide instructions to read a data set or alter the data’s appearance. The DATA step has two phases: compilation and execution. In the compilation phase, declarative statements are processed, and syntax errors are identified. Afterwards, the execution phase processes each executable statement sequentially. Data sets are organized into tables with rows called “observations” and columns called “variables”. Additionally, each piece of data has a descriptor and a value.
The PROC step consists of PROC statements that call upon named procedures. Procedures perform analysis and reporting on data sets to produce statistics, analyses, and graphics. There are more than 300 procedures and each one contains a substantial body of programming and statistical work. PROC statements can also display results, sort data or perform other operations. SAS macros are pieces of code or variables that are coded once and referenced to perform repetitive tasks.
SAS data can be published in HTML, PDF, Excel and other formats using the Output Delivery System, which was first introduced in 2007. The SAS Enterprise Guide is SAS’s point-and-click interface. It generates code to manipulate data or perform analysis automatically and does not require SAS programming experience to use.
SAS Indepth Formats Informats
SAS Introduction and Scope
SAS Class Notes
Creating account in SAS OnDemand for Academics
SAS Class room Training v2