Like many of you, I’m closely following the last season of the ABC drama Lost. I’ve followed Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sawyer et al. through six long years of island confusion. Now, with nine episodes left until the series ends for good, I can see how the writers are setting us up for a final showdown, which, with luck, will tie up all the loose ends they’ve been dangling in front of us for years. Oh, how I wish I could say I was ready to tie up the final loose ends of my SAS certification preparation. But, alas, if our certification journey were a 6-year series, we’d only be midway through season 3. And, indeed, this series may go on so long that it, so to speak, jumps the shark.

Enough about my television habits. On to SAS! This week we completed chapter 9 in the Certification Guide, which was on “Producing Descriptive Statistics.” Uh oh. This instantly reminded me of the disastrous 3-day statistics class I took here at SAS. I was, ahem, “lost” about 3 hours into it (I guess I should have paid more attention to the suggested prerequisite of a college-level statistics course). But, never fear, ye who are scared of standard deviation and confounded by kurtosis: the chapter isn’t that complicated! There is a list of descriptive statistics terms, just to show what keywords you can use with PROC MEANS, but fortunately we weren’t quizzed on them at the end. It is really just a good guide to PROC MEANS, PROC SUMMARY, and PROC FREQ.

Although I can’t imagine remembering the difference between using the BY and the CLASS statement two weeks from now, I was able to muster a 90% score on the quiz. There was one unresolved question that I hope our “community” can help us with. What is the BEST format? I have to assume that it has something to do with the number of decimal places in output, but what does BEST stand for, if anything? Leave a comment here if you know the answer!