Hi, Ed I'm sorry to hear that your introduction to SAS is so frustrating. I'd like to offer a few suggestions, based on your posts. First, you are correct, and as pointed out, SAS is a programming language. It's a very old one, and many of the programming structures are based on an old language called PL/I, which hasn't been used much for many years. In addition, the original language was specifically designed to be optimal for data transformation and statistical analysis, and because of this many of the constructs are different from those in general purpose languages. To add to the complexity, the SAS environment has been massively updated over the last twenty years, to encompass concepts like client-server computing, and creating formatted output in a variety of formats (HTML, PDF, RTF...). The SAS programming language is very rich and powerful, but as you're noticing it can be quite daunting to take in from the beginning. Enterprise Guide is a product that let's you use "point-and-click" functionality to define the operations that you want done. EG then translates these selections into the underlying SAS code, which is what is executed. Because of this, it allows people who haven't made the investment in learning the SAS language to accomplish very significant data transformation and analysis results. In my opinion, it's a major and terrific addition to the suite of SAS tools. Reeza suggests learning the SAS programming language and using it. I'd like to suggest that you may well be able to accomplish a great deal using only the facilities in Enterprise Guide, and while there is a learning investment for that, it's significantly smaller than to learn the SAS language. I describe it to colleagues as the difference between being an end-user, using computer tools (e.g. Word and Excel) to meet business objectives, versus being an IT professional, and using programming tools such as VB and C to design and build programs for general use. The investment you need to make in the former is much lower. In terms of the 220 lines of "yuck" that comes out of your one-way frequency, the majority of that is wrapper code that EG uses to ensure that the results you receive are appropriate to the options you selected (output type, for example), and the computing environment that you are using. There are a number of posts on this forum (particularly by Chris@SAS), that discuss how to interpret, and in some cases mask, this wrapper code. Once you can do this, you can see the true SAS analytical code that is being executed, and it's typically a dozen lines or less. My last suggestion is to keep at it! It's a lot to take in at the beginning, but if your career is in the domain of data preparation and analysis, I don't believe there's a better product out there to efficiently meet these requirements than SAS. Best of luck, Tom
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