2 Very Important Tips for SAS Programmers
SAS Programming, as a data analytics tool has been existing in the industry, for quite some time now. It is interesting to know that many companies, who have this tool as their default programming environment, rarely use it of the data analytics purposes. It is only in the recent years, that the industry has come across the difference that SAS as a tool makes in the world of Data Science. The various attributes of this tool like the fact that it is licensed and has over 40,000 companies using it as their principal software, make it the go-to data analytics tool. While there are a great number of SAS enthusiasts, both at the university as well as the professional level, but it many of them have felt the pressing void, when it comes to programming as majority of them feel the need to learn a certain trick or a certain procedure, in order to make the process easier. This is mainly the reason why a majority of data enthusiasts are looking to get professionally trained in the data analytics tools. Training institutes like Imarticus Learning are most sought after, mainly because of their multiple offerings in various data analytics tools like, SAS Programming, R Programming, Hadoop, Python, Tableau, SQL and so on. When you take up one such course and pursue it, it is easier to save your time and not program the hard way, because SAS resources and SAS efficiency, are two
components that will guarantee you less frustrations and more time savings. Here’s a list of tips and techniques, which will help you become more efficient and find all the answers to each one of your SAS questions. 1. Knowing your data is most important While this may be a very generic advice, but after a sufficient amount of experience, you would definitely understand the absolute need for the same. Consider for instance, you are asked to sort out all the data, for senior citizens’ survey, where you are supposed to find out how much exercise they get on a daily basis. Would you not be flabbergasted, if the data states that, these very senior citizens, exercise for more than 4 hours a day. While they may not be doing any physical labor, but recreational things like gardening would also be counted as exercise. This is the reason why, it is imperative for a SAS programmer to check the data values, frequencies of those values, index variables, missing values and so on.
2. Never Over code It is not always necessary to build reports in the data set itself. While there are a number of Data steps, which are typically used to create and modify all the SAS data sets, these can be also used to produce custom-designed reports. You can not only investigate the data using various procedures, but also go ahead and rearrange it altogether so that the observations become variables and variable become observations. It is very important to never ever assume that you have all the knowledge you need about one single procedure, always reviewing them helps quite a lot.