Attention Educators and Students in the Americas - Free Programming Certification Guided Prep Series

[antonbcristina]

Join us for this 12-week series to prepare to take a Base Programming Certification exam. We'll cover the SAS Programming 1: Essentials and SAS Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques courses, as well as general exam preparation.  

We’re excited to kick-off our series next week. We’ll meet every Wednesday from Sep 4 – Nov 20, 2024, 4:30 – 6:00 p.m. EST. Our weekly live online sessions will include demos, Q&A, and discussions. On your own schedule, complete e-learning videos and exercises. Attend at least eight live sessions and complete the e-learning to receive a free certification voucher! 

Read more about this series here and register by 12 pm EST on Aug 30th, 2024.  

As you navigate through the series, we encourage you to use this post to ask any questions and collaborate with other attendees.   

[antonbcristina]

Today is our first day and we're excited to welcome over 300 attendees for our first session of the series. We’ll walk you through an overview of the Certification Series, provide you with resources and a GAP Overview, and start covering some content right away. See you all at 4:30 pm! 

[antonbcristina]

Welcome back to class today! To ensure you’re ready for this week’s discussion, please complete the following from Programming 1: Essentials: 

• Lesson 1.3 | practices, activities 

• Lesson 2 | practices, activities 

• Lesson 3 | e-learning (lectures only, no practices/activities) 

We're happy to answer any question you might have as you're going through the content. See you all in class! 

[antonbcristina]

Glad to have you all back for Week 4! Rachel will lead tomorrow’s session with a focus on Lesson 4: Preparing Data. We’ll get practice with the DATA step and learn how to use it wisely for our data processing. To best prepare for class, please review the following from Programming 1: Essentials:  

• Lesson 3 | all | practices, activities 

• Lesson 4 | all | e-learning  

Please post any questions that come up as you're going through the content. See you all tomorrow! 

[OliviaOk]

Hi @antonbcristina I am currently working on lesson 6 and I am stuck at the first activity, I went through the steps to create a macro variable named outpath and I didn't see any error or confirmation that it worked in the log. When I try to export the csv file as required I keep getting an error about not specifying a file or table even though I have my macro variable outpath specified in the code. I've attached images, the first one is my log from running the code to set a macro variable, the second screenshot is my code to export the CSV file and the third screenshot is the log from running the code to export a csv file.

[antonbcristina]

Hi @OliviaOk, you're on the right track! When you submit a %LET statement to create a macro variable, you will not see any messages in the LOG. That macro variable is "quietly" created and it is storing the value you specified.  

The issue I see with your code is that you are seeing an ERROR message right after the PROC EXPORT DATA= statement. It hasn't even reached the part where you are using your macro variable. The reason for this is that you have too many semicolons (being interpreted as the end of statements).  Notice in the syntax example above your code that the PROC EXPORT statement ends with one semicolon after the REPLACE option, 3 lines later. 

TLDR: there's nothing wrong with the macro variable definition or use, the ERROR comes from having extra semicolons in your code and I've highlighted them below. 

[OliviaOk]

Ohhh, thank you so much. Can’t believe I missed that.

[antonbcristina]

No worries! That's what we're here for. Hopefully this helps others too 😊

[antonbcristina]

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back for another week of SAS Programming! Today’s session will focus on the analysis and reporting of data. Review the following materials from Programming 1: Essentials in preparation: 

• Lesson 4 | all | practices, activities 

• Lesson 5 | all | e-learning  

Bring all your questions to class or post them here. See you all very soon! 

[antonbcristina]

Thank you everyone for your participation in class last week. Today, we’re doing it all again! Week 6 will focus on Exporting Results and Using SQL, so please make sure you’ve completed the following from the Programming 1: Essentials course: 

• Lesson 5 | all | practices, activities 

• Lesson 6 & 7 | all | e-learning 

Happy reviewing, we’ll see you soon! 

[antonbcristina]

Today marks a new beginning, we’re starting our SAS Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques course! I hope you’ve had a chance to go through the following on your own time before class: 

• PG1: Lesson 6 & 7 | all | practices, activities 

• PG2: Lesson 1 - 2.1 | e-learning 

See you all in class this afternoon! 

[antonbcristina]

Welcome back for Week 8! As a reminder, please review the following from the SAS Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques course: 

• Lesson 1 - 2.1 | practices, activities 

• Lesson 2.2 - 3.3 | e-learning 

We’re happy to answer any questions you might have, please post them here or bring them to class. See you all very soon!  

[Rachel_McLawhon]

Hi everyone! 

Remember the error I encountered last night when trying to do:

Top3Avg = mean(of Quiz1st-Quiz3rd);

How could this be when the other statements in our data step worked! Example:

Quiz1st = largest(1, of Quiz1-Quiz5);

My amazing co-teacher, @antonbcristina, reminded me that the way SAS handles this column list is different from the double dash method:

Top3Avg = mean(Quiz1st -- Quiz3rd);

Using the OF keyword, is referencing a list of variables that have the same prefix (i.e. Quiz) with an index variable (i.e. 1-5), whereas the double dash is a positional column list that references variables as they are located in the PDV (i.e. include Quiz1st, Quiz3rd, and all the variables that are located between these variables in the PDV).

Problem solved and lesson learned!

[antonbcristina]

So glad to have you back for another week! Please review the following from the SAS Programming 2 course: 

• Lesson 2.2 - 3.3 | practices, activities 

• Lesson 3.4 - 5.2 | e-learning 

Please let us know if any questions come up during your review and we’ll see you all soon in class! 

[antonbcristina]

Welcome back everyone! In preparation for today’s class, your homework is the following from the SAS Programming 2 course:  

• Lesson 3.4 - 5.2 | practices, activities 

• Lesson 5.3 - 7 | e-learning 

We’ll see you shortly!