SAS author's tip: PROC MEANS for descriptive statistics

This week's featured tip comes from Professor A. John Bailer and his popular book Statistical Programming in SAS. SAS Press published John's book a little over a year ago and it's a one-size-fits-all resource. Data analyst and SAS user Christine Leonard Westgate says it best in her review "For programmer-analysts tasked with statistics, statisticians tasked with programming, and for everyone in between--this book is a winner!"

I can attest to John's strong presentation skills (he presented a live Webinar as part of the SAS Talks series last year) and he's the kind of professor who could make any subject engaging. His style and sense of humor is also apparent in his book (not that the content isn't exciting on its own). I hope that you will enjoy flipping through Statistical Programming in SAS, if you get a chance. In the meantime, you can read a free chapter from the book here.

Now, on to this week's tip!

The following excerpt is from SAS Press author A. John Bailer's book "Statistical Programming in SAS" Copyright © 2010, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, North Carolina, USA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (please note that results may vary depending on your version of SAS software)

PROC MEANS for descriptive statistics

Means and standard deviations are commonly calculated and reported for numeric variables. The MEANS procedure can calculate a variety of numeric summary statistics. In the following code, the default output statistics from PROC MEANS are requested for the total number of young produced in the nitrofen study. An option to limit the output to two decimal places (MAXDEC=2) is set. Furthermore, this analysis is conducted by levels of the concentration variable. The following code produces the output in Display 3.31: