Converting Focus programs to SAS

[deleted_user]

Dear All,

Is there any tool to convert FOCUS programs to SAS programs?


Thanks
Narayana KR

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:
I don't know of any conversion tools, however, some of my students in the Report Writing class have told me that PROC REPORT, PROC SQL and a bit of PROC TABULATE (for a lot of nested dimensions) are what they use to duplicate/reproduce their Focus reports.

cynthia

[boschy]

I was once hired to evaluate the feasibility of doing this on a large scale.

There no easy way to do it. One tricky aspect is the FOCUS JOIN syntax and JOIN options, which to me are counter-intuitive and difficult to convert to an SQL-style query. This is especially true if DB column and table names have been converted to shorter 'legacy' aliases in the masterfile definitions. Shudder.

The bottom line is that every step must be tested very carefully. Estimate with generous fudge factors. Good luck...better you then me!

-Rod

Message was edited by: boschy