SAS Search Video Scripts

You can browse to find the topics that you need. For example, you can click on a category in the Knowledge Base list on the left side of the SAS Customer Support page at support.sas.com. I want to find a document, so I'll click Product Documentation.

Because I want a document for the latest version, I'll click SAS 9.2. At this point, I see a search box and links to an alphabetical list of products and a listing by topics. Finally, I see a series of quick links to commonly accessed topics.

I'm going to browse by topic, so I'll click the Browse by topic link and access the Browse SAS 9.2 Documentation page.

This page displays a selection of broad topic categories, with links to more specific sub-categories listed under each. I want to look at the topics for the Data Sources sub-category, which I can find under the Data Management category. When I click the Data Sources link, I get a list of appropriate documents.

Finally, you can drill down even further by clicking the down arrow for Data Sources in the topic path displayed above the search results. In this case, I'll narrow my search by selecting External Databases in the pop-up box. If you don't see a down arrow at the end of the topic path, you've simply come to the end of the path and cannot drill any deeper.

I've searched on the term "distribution" in the Samples & SAS Notes category of the SAS Knowledge Base. My search has generated 300 results, but that seems like a large haystack for the particular needle that I need to find. I'll use the filter tabs at the top of the page to narrow my results.

I'll begin by using a filter to specify a type of document. When I click the Type tab, I see a pop-up box that lists the types of documents available in the Samples & SAS Notes category. After I select Usage Note, the 106 available usage notes are displayed in the search results.

Note that the Type tab is no longer bolded. The available filters change dynamically as I work through the filtering process.

My next step is to constrain the results by Product. First, I'll select Base SAS in the pop-up box. I see that my results now consist of 22 usage notes about Base SAS.

When I click the SAS Release tab, I can see that the number of usage notes has remained pretty stable over the last few releases. I don't think I need this filter after all, so I'll click the tab again to close the pop-up box.

I'd like to broaden the scope of the search to include all types of sample and SAS Note content. I can do that by clicking Reset Filter in the Type: Usage Note filter row. Now I'm back to 70 results from all kinds of sample and SAS Note documents.

Finally, I'll click Reset All Filters in the Applied Filters row. That removes all filters and gives me 301 results. It looks like an additional item has come on line since I began the filtering process.

The Knowledge Base search process gives you a handy set of tools that you can use to process your search results. Links to these tools are displayed in the upper-right corner of the search pages.

First, you can click the Print link to bring up the Print window for the browser.

Second, you can click the E-mail link to bring up a new message in your e-mail client.

The body of the message contains the term entered into the search field, the browse path for the search, and the URL for the results page. You can just supply a recipient in the To field and send it.

Third, you can click the Bookmark link to save the URL for the search results page to the bookmarks list in your browser. In this case, I'm adding the URL to a folder that I've created to collect search results.

You can open a document to see a final tool for working with your results. If you click the Feedback link in the upper right corner, you'll be taken to a feedback form. Here, you can enter any comments that you have about the document. These comments will be sent to the group that produced the document.

I have browsed into the product documentation for SAS 9.2 and focused on the reference material for Base SAS.

The browsing process has generated the following string in the Search field: product:"Base SAS" display:first. The display:first specification limits the results to items that refer to Base SAS on the title page, but we still see 64 results.

I can tailor the search field terms to look for references to reports. First, I'll replace display:first with title:report. This brings up 79 Base SAS 9.2 references with the word "Report" in the title. I notice that many of these items refer to either PROC REPORT or the REPORT Procedure.

I want to focus on PROC REPORT, so I'll add the word proc to the search terms. This step narrows the results to 21 items.

However, I want to make sure that I'm finding the term PROC REPORT and not titles that simply include the words proc and report. I'll enclose proc report in quotation marks. Any words enclosed in quotes are treated as a single entity. I see only four items now.

I'd like to see more, so I'll remove the references to the Base SAS product and the title from the search. Now I see 78 items.

Clearly, the quotation marks are a powerful tool for adjusting the scope of your searches. After I remove them from proc report, I see 401 items.

I want to explore one more topic. I'll search the term distribution in the SAS 9.2 reference documentation. Notice that I get 196 results.

If I change the search term to dist, however, the results are trimmed dramatically to 17.

The search for dist does not look for all items that contain words that include the four letters in dist, as many search engines do. Instead, it looks for dist as a separate word. The Knowledge Base search engine does not take parts of words as search terms. It treats whatever you enter as a complete unit.