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Version 8 Enhancements to the Analyst Application
The Analyst Application is a point-and-click interface that provides access to basic statistical analyses. Designed for the desktop environment of PCs and workstations, it is a useful tool for students and researchers as well as for experienced SAS users who desire a convenient interface to widely used statistical techniques. The Analyst was made available as an add-on to Release 6.12.
The application provides a wide range of analytical and graphical tasks. You can compute descriptive statistics, analyze crosstabulations, and fit models with analysis of variance and regression analysis. The application also provides some tasks not covered by SAS procedures, such as a variety of hypothesis tests and basic sample size and power computations. In addition, you can produce several types of graphs, including histograms and box-and-whisker plots.
In Version 8, the Analyst Application has been enhanced in several ways. The Project Tree organizes results by projects, and you can open data sets within those projects by directly clicking on data nodes. Data access and management facilities have been enhanced, and you can produce basic reports, pie charts, and bar charts. In addition, the statistical capabilities of the Analyst Application have been strengthened to include survival analysis, repeated measurements, multivariate statistics, and mixed models.
Managing Projects with the Project
Tree
The Analyst results are now organized at the project level, and a single project can include multiple data sets. You can quickly open a data set by clicking on it in the Project Tree, which has been expanded to include any output data set produced in an analysis. You can click on that output data node to open that data in the Data Table and then proceed to do further analysis. In addition, you can set preferences for whether nodes for HTML output and SAS code appear in the Project Tree.
Statistical Enhancements
This release introduces techniques for survival analysis, including Kaplan-Meier and life table estimation as well as Cox regression. The application now provides basic repeated measurements analysis that provides flexible model specification and a wide range of error structures. Another new task provides basic mixed models techniques including the analysis of split plot designs. New multivariate capabilities include canonical correlation and principal components analysis. For the logistic regression task, you can now enter classification variables and take advantage of complete model-building facilities that include effects like interactions and quadratic terms.
Data Management, Manipulation, and Access
The Analyst provides more comprehensive facilities for data management in Version 8. You can combine data sets by columns and rows, split and stack columns in the Data Table, and use the redesigned Compute Window to create new variables. New Recode dialogs make it easy to recode values and ranges of an existing variable. 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. Inputting data from Excel and other formats is now as easy as selecting the correct file type from the File Open dialog.
New Graphs and Reports
New to the Analyst Application are basic business graphics: you can produce two- and three-dimensional pie and bar charts. In addition, you can also produce tabular reports, choosing from six basic report templates. In addition, all of the new statistical tasks include new graphics as well, such as survivor function plots in the Life Table analysis task.
HTML Output Now Available
With the incorporation of the Output Delivery System into SAS/STAT software, the Analyst Application can produce HTML versions of most analysis results for viewing with a web browser. When you set the HTML preference, folders containing HTML output appear in the Project Tree.
Other Enhancements
You can now easily invoke SAS/INSIGHT software from within the Analyst Application. You can cut and paste graphics from results windows to commonly used word processing applications including Microsoft Word. In addition, the Data Table now provides extended point-and-click features including sorting, moving, inserting, hiding, duplicating, and deleting columns.
Statistics and Operations Research Home Page | What's New in Data Analysis
