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Analyst Application Data Management

Data

Opening Data

You can open data files by opening an existing SAS data set, importing a non-SAS data set, or manually entering the data. Using the host Open window, you can open a wide range of data types including

You can also open existing SAS data sets using traditional library and table naming conventions, and you can assign new libraries from within the application. Using the Query tools available with the Analyst Application, you can use new and existing SQL queries to access your enterprise data.

The Data Table

When you open data in the Analyst Application, the data are brought into the Data Table where you can view and edit the data and rearrange the columns and rows. Whether the Data Table is opened in browse, edit, or shared edit mode is determined in the the Viewer Settings dialog. When you are in Edit or Shared Edit mode, you can make changes to the Data Table by selecting a cell and typing in it.

The Data Table
Figure 1: The Data Table

From the Data Table, you can access pop-up menus by clicking directly on variable names or observations numbers. Using the pop-up menus, you can insert, duplicate, move, hide, hold, and sort columns and add, copy, and delete rows. You can also change column properties such as names, labels, and formats.

Managing Data

Once you are working with an active data set, you can perform a wide range of data manipulation tasks to prepare your data for analysis. You can filter your data to analyze a subset and sort multiple columns at one time, each in ascending or descending order.

Data pulldown menu
Figure 2: The Data Pulldown Menu

Using the redesigned Compute window, you can create expressions to form a new variable from existing variables. The Compute window provides access to an extensive set of mathematical and statistical functions, and when you select an individual function, the application displays a description and an example of its use. When you have completed creating your expression, you can verify that the expression is valid before you submit your request. You can also standardize a current variable to have a given mean and standard deviation, and you can create new variables by ranking existing variables with rank types such as fractional ranks, percentile ranks, median scores, normal scores, and Savage scores.

New Recode dialogs make it easy to recode values and ranges of an existing variable, and you can easily convert variables from numeric-to-character and character-to-numeric. Menus offer quick access to commonly used transformations such as log and square root, and you can easily produce random variates from a wide range of distributions. You can combine data sets by columns and rows, split and stack columns, transpose data, and random sample your data.

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