Just completed SAS Programming 1: Essentials

[analyticalgiant]

Hello SAS community,

I just completed my e-learning of SAS Programming 1: Essentials course this afternoon after studying over the past 3-4 weeks. I know I learned a lot and I'm most definitely interested in pursuing my education further in SAS. However I'm interested in any tips on how I can practice what I've learned so far? As I continue to teach myself more techniques and study for the Base Exam.

And I have copies of the SAS Programming books 1-3, Enterprise Guide 1 and the Little Book of SAS.

Also, I'm a business process improvement analyst for an insurance company, have flexibility with my manager to play with many reports and see how I can improve their functionality in using SAS 9.3. Are the essentials I learned a good base of manipulating excel documents (mostly spreadsheets, pivots, graphs and some vba macros)? What should I look for?

All ideas are appreciated, thanks!

Mathieu

[beccagre]

Hello,

One suggestion would be to get a copy of the SAS Certification Prep Guide BASE Programming for SAS 9.  The book provides a great summary of many of the topics that you have already learned and is a good reference book.  In addition there are quizzes at the end of each chapter and those quiz questions will allow for you to do some practice.  You can find the book at:  www.sas.com/store/books

This is just one idea. 

Good luck to you.

[analyticalgiant]

Thanks! I'll pick up one of those guides.

[Reeza · Accepted solution]

I would see if you could get a copy of SAS 9.4

Things I would suggest learning:

• PROC REPORT
• ODS EXCEL/TAGSETS.ExcelXP
• PROC MEANS/FREQ - how to get output in various formats
• Data Step -> OUTPUT statement
• Basics of Macro

For learning, I would suggest searching your topic of interest at LexJansen.com.

And last but not least, try your hand at answering questions on here. Don't look at the solutions first, but try and code it yourself. Then see what the solutions are. 1 question/20 minutes a day will have you up to speed in no time.

[analyticalgiant]

Thanks! I'll try to get upgraded to 9.4
LexJansen a cool site I'll have to get acquainted with. And I'll look for the Q & A section.

[ballardw]

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@analyticalgiant wrote:

Also, I'm a business process improvement analyst for an insurance company, have flexibility with my manager to play with many reports and see how I can improve their functionality in using SAS 9.3. Are the essentials I learned a good base of manipulating excel documents (mostly spreadsheets, pivots, graphs and some vba macros)? What should I look for?

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I think your idea of replicating and modifying reports you already have is a good one. That way you have an idea of what the results should be though you may display them in a new fashion.

Depending on what and how you learned Excel functionality that may be an impediment to learning SAS. There are a number of things that some places do with Excel that new SAS users will attempt to replicate the Excel steps because they learned a mechanical process: "Highlight and push button" instead of "sum a group of values". The first doesn't lend itself to SAS but the second is another story.

One thing I might suggest would be to see how much you can do with Proc Report or Proc Tabulate (tabulate may be better if you nest groups in both rows and columns). Hint: If you are used to working with data that looks like:

Rowid   January_value February_value March_value then 90% of the time you likely want to transpose the data to

Rowid Month Value  where Month indicates January February etc.

[analyticalgiant]

Thanks! Great info I'll work on applying in my practice.