Four authors. Four papers. One set of data.
The month of August and the 2014 Call for Content are just around the corner, and this seems like a good time to share a little inspiration and innovation. The Foundations and Fundamentals paper section at SAS Global Forum 2013 featured a four-part series--“A Day in the Life of Data”—based on real-world activities and designed for inexperienced SAS programmers.
With SAS software, there are as many ways to solve a problem as there are SAS programmers--and each solution works well. But if you’re inexperienced with SAS, how do you pick the right technique? and how to you get from raw data to polished table or graph? Our four authors accepted the challenge from Foundations section chair, Peter Eberhardt. Each paper walks SAS novices through four major development tasks: reading, manipulating, managing and reporting.
In A Day in the Life of Data – Part 1, Brian Bee explores the structure of data sources common to today’s organization: Microsoft, proprietary databases and other data or text files. Bee explains how to use tools such as SAS Access to PC Files, SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Program editor to import data into a SAS data set from each one of these formats.
But as Harry Droogendyk points out in Part 2 of the series, a typical organization deals with millions of rows and thousands of columns of data. It’s rare to find the information you want to analyze in a single table or data set or source file. The next stage in the process is often manipulating that data: joining tables, reformatting variables, summarizing those millions of rows. Droogendyk explores in depth two common techniques for joining tables: the MERGE statement and the SQL procedure. The examples include how to detect and repair common problems associated with data joins. Droogendyk also introduces the concept of a data view and how to take advantage of SAS metadata to simplify tasks.
In a larger organization, all this data and its associated programs will be used by others: business analysts, statisticians or other professional who’ll use them to gain some insight. Data professionals must rely on the SAS programmer to provide easy acces to the data, to ensure that processes are auditable and to keep data acquistion processes running smoothly. A Day in the Life of Data – Part 3 by Peter Crawford covers these topics: how to share and reuse code with other programmers, the rules for SASAUTOS, managing SAS datasets, collecting information about processes.
The fourth and final paper demonstrates the value of good visual representations of raw data in helping us understand the data, especially when they’re presented alongside derived statistics. Who better than Sanjay Matange to take on graphing and reporting in A Day in the Life of Data—Part 4. To start the discussion, Matange provides an overview of the statistical graphics procedures: SGPLOT, SGPANEL and SGSCATTER and then walks readers through a sequence of univariate analyses using the data sets.
Did "A Day in the Life of Data" make you think of a good paper series? I think a series is a useful way to cover the full range of data tasks, tools options and visualization techniques involved in an analytic solution.
