Producing Charts to Summarize Variables

Understanding the Charting Tools

Base SAS software provides two procedures that produce charts:

PROC CHART
PROC UNIVARIATE

PROC CHART produces a variety of charts for character or numeric variables. The charts include vertical and horizontal bar charts, block charts, pie charts, and star charts. These types of charts graphically display the values of a variable or a statistic that are associated with those values. PROC UNIVARIATE produces histograms for continuous numeric variables that enable you to visualize the distribution of your data.

PROC CHART is a useful tool to visualize data quickly. However, you can use PROC GCHART(footnote 1) to produce high-resolution, publication-quality bar charts that include color and various fonts when your site licenses SAS/GRAPH software. You can use PROC UNIVARIATE to customize the histograms by adding tables with summary statistics directly on the graphical display. PROC UNIVARIATE also enables you to overlay the histogram with fitted density curves or kernel density estimates so that you can examine the underlying distribution of your data.

FOOTNOTE 1: PROC GCHART and PROC CHART produce identical charts.

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