SAS Data Structure Screenshots Tutorial

SAS Data Sets are comprised of two sections: a descriptor section and a data section.

Data set Descriptor Section

SAS Data Section of Output

Data can also be viewed, entered, or edited in the SAS Data Viewtable:

SAS Data Set Terminology

• Variables -- columns in a SAS data set.
• Observations -- rows in a SAS data set.
• Numeric Data -- values that are treated as numerals and may include 8 bytes of floating storage for 16 to 17 significant digits.
• Character Data -- non-numeric data values such as letters, numbers, special characters, and blanks. May be stored with a length of 1 to 32,767 bytes. One byte is equal to one character.

SAS Data Set and Variable Name Criteria

• can be 32 characters long
• can be uppercase, lowercase, or a mixture of the cases
• are not case sensitive
• cannot start with a number and cannot contain special characters or blanks.
• must start with a letter or underscore.

SAS Dates

• Dates are treated as a special kind of numeric data. They are treated as the number of days since January 1st 1960. January 1st 1960 is the 0 point. SAS dates can go back to 1582 (Gregorian Calendar) and forward to the year 20000.
• Time is scored as th number of seconds since midnight. SAS date time is the number of seconds since January 1st, 1960

Note the missing value for faculty ID 9 above.

Missing values are valid values

• for character data, missing values are displayed as blanks
• for numeric data, missing values are displayed as periods

For additional questions or assistance, contact Tina Ughrin.