Chapter 1: Overview

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Introduction

The Analyst Application is a data analysis tool that provides easy access to basic statistical analyses. The application is intended for students and researchers as well as experienced SAS users and statisticians.

This interface takes a task-oriented approach to produce analyses and associated graphics. You can compute descriptive statistics, perform simple hypothesis tests, fit statistical models with regression and analysis of variance, and perform survival analysis as well as some multivariate analyses.

Most of the tasks provide access to analyses performed by SAS/STAT software, but some provide analyses not currently available with SAS/STAT procedures, such as certain hypothesis tests and basic sample size and power computations. In addition, you can produce many types of graphs, including histograms, box-and- whisker plots, probability plots, contour plots, and surface plots.

The Analyst Application enables you to input data in many ways, including opening data from external sources such as Excel files, inputting SAS data sets, or manually entering the data yourself. The data are displayed in a data table in which columns correspond to variables and rows correspond to observations or cases. You can edit individual elements in the data table, and you can create new columns and rows. You can also perform a number of other data manipulations such as subsetting the data, performing transforms, recoding, and stacking and splitting columns.

Once the data are ready, you specify tasks from pull-down menus, a customizable toolbar, or an index of commonly used task descriptions. The analysis results and plots are presented in separate windows and managed by a tree-list structure called a project tree. The underlying SAS code used to produce the results is available as a node in the project tree, and results can also be displayed in HTML form and viewed with a web browser. You can save projects and then recall them for further work.

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