NESUG Sunday Workshops

Get a jump start on the conference by taking advantage of Sunday Workshops being offered on NESUG 2007 opening day! These workshops provide you an opportunity to explore a topic not otherwise offered during the conference, or to delve more deeply into a topic of interest to you. They are open to registered conference attendees for an additional fee of $150 per workshop. To participate, click the appropriate boxes when registering. Please note that space is limited and registration will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis at the conference.

Sunday, September 14

8:30 am - 11:30 am

Exploring SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1

Stacey Syphus
SAS Institute

Overview:

SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 is a powerful application that allows users to take advantage of the data processing and analysis power of SAS in a point and click tool. In this workshop, the following features will be addressed:

Navigating the Enterprise Guide environment
Accessing various type of data including SAS and Excel
Creating summary statistics reports in HTML, PDF and RTF formats
Using the Enterprise Guide query tool to subset data, compute new columns and join tables
Creating tabular summary reports and interactive graphics using Enterprise Guide's dynamic wizards

Instructor's bio:

Stacey Syphus is a SAS instructor and Enterprise Guide curriculum manager for SAS Education. After receiving master's degree in statistics from Brigham Young University, Stacey used SAS and JMP extensively while working as a statistician for Intel. When she first came to SAS 7 years ago, Enterprise Guide was in its software infancy. Since then, she has become the Enterprise Guide expert within SAS Education, focusing on both end user and administrator training. Besides teaching and writing Enterprise Guide courses, Stacey also teaches programming and statistics courses. Stacey currently lives in Sacramento, CA.

PROC SQL can be rather intimidating for those who have learned SAS® data management techniques using exclusively the DATA Step. However, when it comes to data manipulation, SAS often provides more than one method to achieve the same result, and SQL provides another valuable tool to have in one's repertoire. Further, Structured Query Language is implemented in many widely used relational database systems with which SAS may interface, so it is a worthwhile skill to have from that perspective as well.

This workshop will present a series of increasingly complex examples and hands-on exercises. In each case I will demonstrate the DATA Step method with which users are probably already familiar, followed by SQL code that will accomplish the same data manipulation. The simplest examples will include subsetting variables (columns, in SQL parlance) and observations (rows), while the most complex situations will include MERGEs (JOINS) of several types and the summarization of information over multiple observations for BY groups of interest. In this hands-on presentation, I'll then pose a data manipulation challenge, providing a skeleton of the needed SQL code to give attendees a chance to try out the technique just presented. This approach will clarify for which situations the DATA STEP method or, conversely, PROC SQL would be better suited. The attendee will come away with a good grounding in Data Step to PROC SQL translation – die-hard Data Step-ers may even find themselves "thinking in SQL"!

Christianna Williams is a Senior Associate with Abt Associates in the Health Policy Division. She received her PhD in Epidemiology from Yale University in 2002. Christianna has been using SAS for data management and statistical analysis in research since 1985. A member of the NESUG Executive Committee, she was conference co-chair for NESUG 2007 in Baltimore. She can’t decide which she prefers – writing SAS programs or teaching other people about SAS!

Conference Content - Sunday Morning Workshops

Sunday Morning Workshops