SAS Enterprise Guide: Explore Data before you start Analysing....

SAS Enterprise Guide: Explore Data before you start Analysing....

 New version of SAS Enterprise Guide 5.1 has some features which really can reduce the significant time of programmer. One of the feature, I like most in SAS enterprise guide is “explore” option in data.

Generally as a programmer, before I start writing any program for reporting, I love to explore my data to understand data in detail. 

 

I search for answers of following questions before writing the programs.

       1)      What variables are available in data sets

       2)      What are their types

       3)      How many distinct values are available  

       4)      What is descriptive statistics for the numeric data

       5)      Will visualizing data makes more sense??

And many more…. Questions answers I get by writing the procedures like PROC FREQ, PROC MEANS, PROC CONTENTS, PROC PRINT etc. and endup spending lots of time.

SAS Enterprise Guide 5.1 have additional option of exploring data before getting in to project window.

All you need to do is go to library and right click on your data to select option “EXPLORE”.

Once you click the explore option from menu, new explorer window will open up which is really good to understand the basics about the data.

It shows all columns by default. On Right hand side DATA Filter is available where you can select only required column or observations by filtering the data. You can also sort the data based on requirement

If you want to select few columns for further understanding, just click on select column option in right hand side and pop up window will open to ask for column to select for display purpose.

Once selected you can click on “view updates” option to get updated result after applying filters.

This small window will show you what all updates are applied and sort order has been specified for those variables as well as properties of the data you are working on.

If you click on second tab in explore window on SAS Enterprise guide 5.1, you will get hell lot for statistics to characterize your data, both for numeric and character variables.

If you click on the graph it gives nice representation of frequency count for character variables.

It also give you output in tabular form same as PROC FREQ procedure

For Numeric variable it also provides the distribution analysis of variables you have selected.

In short, now task became more easy with SAS Enterprise Guide.

Even Lazy programmers now can quickly do analysis without much efforts..