There is a new version of this course. Please see SAS Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques .

This course is for those who need to learn SAS DATA step programming techniques for processing, controlling, and manipulating SAS data sets. The course builds on the concepts that are presented in the SAS Programming 1: Essentials course and is not recommended for beginning SAS software users.

• control SAS data set input and output
• combine SAS data sets
• read and summarize different types of data
• perform DO loop and SAS array processing
• transform character, numeric, and date variables.

Who should attend

Before attending this course, you should have at least six months of experience writing SAS programs or have completed the SAS Programming 1: Essentials course and used SAS for at least one month. Specifically, you should be able to

• create and access files in your operating environment
• explain the structure of a SAS program
• explore the structure and contents of a SAS data set
• distinguish between syntax and data errors
• debug a SAS program
• create a SAS data set from a fixed-format external file
• subset the rows and columns of a SAS data set
• create derived variables
• write conditional logic statements
• read and write SAS date values
• access SAS data libraries
• sort a SAS data set
• read one or more SAS data sets using a SET statement
• perform a simple merge using a MERGE statement
• create detail and summary reports from a SAS data set
• place titles and footnotes on reports.

This course addresses Base SAS software.

This course is appropriate for students who are using SAS 9 software.

• review of SAS basics
• review of DATA step processing
• review of displaying SAS data sets
• working with existing SAS data sets

• outputting multiple observations
• writing to multiple SAS data sets
• selecting variables and observations
• writing to external files

• creating an accumulating total variable
• accumulating totals for a group of data

• reading delimited raw data files
• controlling when a record loads
• reading hierarchical raw data files

• manipulating character variables
• manipulating numeric variables
• manipulating numeric variables based on dates
• converting variable type

• performing DO loop processing
• performing SAS array processing

• match-merging two or more SAS data sets
• performing simple joins using the SQL procedure (self-study)

• identifying additional resources