Chapter 1: Choosing the Right Procedure

Functional Categories of Base SAS Procedures

Report Writing

These procedures display useful information, such as data listings (detail reports), summary reports , calendars, letters , labels, multipanel reports, and graphical reports:

CALENDAR	PLOT	SUMMARY [*]
CHART [*]	PRINT	TABULATE [*]
FREQ [*]	REPORT [*]	TIMEPLOT
MEANS [*]	SQL [*]
[*] These procedures produce reports and compute statistics.

Statistics

These procedures compute elementary statistical measures that include descriptive statistics based on moments, quantiles, confidence intervals, frequency counts, cross-tabulations, correlations , and distribution tests. They also rank and standardize data:

CHART	RANK	SUMMARY
CORR	REPORT	TABULATE
FREQ	SQL	UNIVARIATE
MEANS	STANDARD

Utilities

These procedures perform basic utility operations. They create, edit, sort , and transpose data sets, create and restore transport data sets, create user -defined formats, and provide basic file maintenance such as to copy, append, and compare data sets:

APPEND	EXPORT	PWENCODE
BMDP [*]	FONTREG	PRTEXP
CATALOG	FORMAT	REGISTRY [*]
CIMPORT	FSLIST	RELEASE
COMPARE	IMPORT	SORT
CONTENTS	OPTIONS	SOURCE [*]
CONVERT [*]	OPTLOAD	SQL
COPY	OPTSAVE	TAPECOPY [*]
CPORT	PDS [*]	TAPELABEL [*]
CV2VIEW [@]	PDSCOPY [*]	TEMPLATE [+]
DATASETS	PMENU	TRANSPOSE
DBCSTAB [#]	PRINTTO	TRANTAB [#]
DOCUMENT [+]	PRTDEF
[*] See the SAS documentation for your operating environment for a description of these procedures. [@] See SAS/ACCESS for Relational Databases: Reference for a description of this procedure. [+] See The Complete Guide to the SAS Output Delivery System for a description of these procedures. [#] See SAS National Language Support (NLS): User s Guide for a description of these procedures.