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Interview with Lora D. Delwiche and Susan J. Slaughter

author photo Authorline catches up with Lora D. Delwiche and Susan J. Slaughter, coauthors of The Little SAS Book series, about their provocative new guide "Coming to SAS from SPSS".
Authorline: The two of you and your The Little SAS Book series are highly regarded in the SAS user community. We anticipate that your newly launched guide "Coming to SAS from SPSS: A Programming Approach" will create new SAS converts, as well as make the transition to using SAS much easier.

In your introduction to the document, you speak to the similarity between SAS and SPSS. If you will, please briefly comment on the advantages of using SAS.

Lora Delwiche: This is an area where we want to tread lightly because both SAS and SPSS are constantly evolving. If we say that SPSS doesn't have this or that feature that SAS has, it's highly likely that in a year or two it will. For example, when we wrote the third edition of The Little SAS Book, you could create HTML, PDF, and RTF output in SAS, but SPSS could create only HTML. Now SPSS has its Output Management System, which provides many of the features of the SAS Output Delivery System including PDF and RTF output.
 
Susan Slaughter: In general though, it's fair to say that SAS has more features than SPSS. For example, in "Coming to SAS from SPSS," we say that SPSS has over 100 functions while SAS has over 1,000. One interesting point about this statistic is that the documentation for SPSS 17 actually says that SPSS has only "over 70 functions." However, depending on how you count the functions in SPSS, you could come up with a higher number. We wanted to be fair to SPSS, so in our document we bumped the number up to 100. Still, the fact that SAS has an order of magnitude more functions than SPSS says something about the relative power and flexibility of each product.
What motivated you to create this guide?
Susan: Years ago when I worked at Johns Hopkins University, a group of SPSS users asked me to teach them SAS. That was my first introduction to SPSS. I was struck by how easy it is to get stuck on superficial differences such as terminology, for example, cases vs. observations, input formats vs. informats. In SPSS, if you want one-way frequencies, you use one procedure, but if you want two-way frequencies you use a different procedure. So SPSS users tend to think of frequencies and cross-tabulations as two entirely different things. But in SAS one-way, two-way, and on up to n-way frequencies are all produced by the same procedure so SAS users think of them as examples of the same basic type of analysis. I thought it would be nice to write something to help SPSS users to understand SAS (and vice versa), such as a document to promote cross-cultural understanding.
 
Lora: When we wrote the first edition of The Little SAS Book, we included an appendix titled "Coming to SAS from SPSS." Over the years, we've learned that many people won't even glance at anything in an appendix. When we mentioned the existence of this appendix to people, the response was invariably one of surprise. So we came up with the idea of taking material from the appendix and making it available online as a download. We hope more people will find it this way.
Who is the target audience?
Susan: The primary target audience is people who are currently programming in SPSS but who would like to use SAS. This document should also be useful to SAS programmers who have been handed SPSS data files and need to get that data moved into SAS.
 
Lora: This document will not be particularly useful to people who use SPSS only via the point-and-click interface. Our long-term plans include writing a parallel document for those folks, "Coming to SAS from SPSS: A Point-and-Click Approach." But that project will have to wait until after we get our next book written.
How does it differ from your newest release of The Little SAS Book?
Lora: The fourth edition of The Little SAS Book does have an appendix for SPSS users, and this document was initially based on that. But we found, once we took the appendix out of the context of the book, that we needed to add a lot more material. We added some nice examples of the great things you can do with user-defined formats in SAS that you couldn't do in SPSS, and an example showing how easy it is to use ODS statements to produce statistical graphics and output in different formats.
 
Susan: Then we also found, as we got more in depth comments from developers, that we really needed to cover permanent format catalogs-something that we don't currently cover in The Little SAS Book at all. So this document brings together material from different parts of the book, but it also goes beyond what is covered in the book.

Some SPSS users may find that this document combined with the online SAS Help and Documentation is all they need to get their work done. We hope, of course, that some of the SPSS users will want to learn more about SAS and will decide to buy our book, but that won't be the case for everyone.

What do you most hope that readers will take away from "Coming to SAS from SPSS"?
Susan: It's perfectly natural that people will prefer a software product they know well over one that they know less well, but we hope that readers will take away a healthy respect for each product.

I think it's fair to say that most of what we cover in "Coming to SAS from SPSS" is easy to do, but some of the features we cover are not very well documented so people have been left to flounder. This document helps to fill that gap, and should make the transition easier.

 
Lora: We tried to show SPSS programmers that there are some really cool things they can do in SAS that you can't do in SPSS, such as using multiple user-defined formats for a single variable. So we hope that SPSS users will feel excited about what they can do with SAS.

After this interview SAS Press editor-in-chief Julie Platt adds her thoughts about the importance of this resource and invites viewer feedback.

Julie Platt: We frequently receive feedback from customers, particularly in the academic market, that they want to move from SPSS to SAS. Having a guide that covers basic tasks and terminology in SPSS and maps them to the equivalent tasks and terminology in SAS will make that transition as easy as possible.

This guide will be easily accessible. It can simply be downloaded from the SAS companion site or from one of the SAS Publishing partners (Amazon, Books24X7, NetLibrary).

This guide may be just a starting point. Our hope is that our users will offer suggestions for additional topics that should be covered. Over time, these suggestions can help expand this guide, with the goal of offering the best possible support to those SPSS users who are moving to SAS. Take a look and send us your feedback at saspress@sas.com!

 

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