Hi, Paige:
Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, when I was young SAS newbie (no comments from the peanut gallery, those of you who know how -long- ago that was when I was "young"), "characterize your data" meant doing a bunch of PROC FREQs on all the character variables in the dataset and a PROC UNIVARIATE on all the numeric variables (to find the extreme obs, the mean and the median values).
And, sure enough, if you check out the EG "Characterize Data" task, it's doing just that -- the equivalent of PROC CONTENTS, PROC FREQ and PROC UNIVARIATE -- along with some GCHARTS thrown in to graphically show you the data and some PROC PRINTS of the data.
When I worked for lawyers, we'd give them that big stack of paper and then they'd formulate the questions (let's see the salary history of these 20 people; who makes over the median salary in these job categories, etc, etc.) but they'd always want the reams and reams of initial "paper" first.
cynthia