Hi, everyone.
My name is Luna Bozeman, and I'm a technical trainer at SAS.
Welcome to your tutorial on Analyzing Census Data in SAS Studio.
This tutorial series contains six videos, the first being this overview video.
In subsequent tutorials, I'll walk you through the process of accessing US census data and exploring it using SAS Studio.
You'll learn to import, visualize, prepare, and analyze data using SAS.
Let's start with the data.
Every year, the US Census Bureau publishes demographic,
socioeconomic, housing, and business statistics for all communities in the country.
Whether you're a market analyst wanting to learn more about your customers
or a student working on a case study to learn more about your community,
the Census Bureau makes it easy for you to access the data you need to gain those insights.
As the industry leader in analytics, SAS has many tools that you can use to analyze data. The
tool that we'll use throughout this series is SAS Studio, a browser-based SAS programming interface.
But you don't need to know how to write SAS code to use SAS Studio because it also contains
visual point-and-click tasks that enable you to take advantage of the power of SAS.
In this tutorial series, you'll learn how to use these tasks to analyze census data.
If you already have access to SAS Studio, that's great. If you'd like to use your own installation to follow along
with the tutorials and complete the practices, you need to make sure you have three things--
SAS 9.4 maintenance release 3 or later,
a license for SAS/ACCESS Interface to PC Files, and the SAS/STAT product.
If you're not sure what you have, check the notes for this tutorial below or on the main tutorial page.
If you have those requirements, you can skip ahead to the Setting Up the Tutorial Data chapter in this video.
If you don't have those or you don't have access to SAS Studio,
don't worry.
Follow the instructions in the Accessing SAS Studio Using SAS OnDemand for
Academics chapter in this video to access SAS Studio.
It's free for learners.
Let me show you how easy it is to create a SAS OnDemand for Academics account.
If you would like a written version of the instructions that contains the links that I mentioned,
look in the description below or on the main tutorial page.
In your browser, go to welcome.oda.sas.com.
If you already have a SAS profile, then great.
You can enter in your username and password to begin the registration process.
But if you don't have a SAS profile, you can click on where it says "Don't have a SAS profile?" and
follow through the instructions to create your SAS profile.
Once you have a SAS profile, again, come back to welcome.oda.sas.com
and then sign in using your SAS profile.
The first time you sign in, you will be prompted to select a home region.
Once your sign up request process has been completed, you'll receive an email letting you know that you're
ready to start using SAS OnDemand for Academics.
Simply return to welcome.oda.sas.com,
sign in,
and then under Applications select SAS Studio.
Now you're ready to use SAS Studio.
Whether you're using your own installation of SAS Studio
or accessing it through SAS OnDemand for Academics,
you need to set up the tutorial data if you want to follow along with the videos and complete the practices.
Let me walk you through the steps. You can always find
these instructions in the description below or on the main tutorial page.
Before you begin to work in SAS Studio, you need to download the tutorial materials.
You can find a link to the tutorial materials in the description below
or on the main tutorial page.
Once you have the materials downloaded, come back in to SAS Studio.
Taking a look at SAS Studio, you will see by default the Navigation pane
on the left-hand side
and then the work area on the right-hand side.
In the Navigation pane, you'll see that the Server Files and Folder section
is expanded by default.
In this section is where we're going to have to create a folder to store all of our work throughout this tutorial series.
So what I'll do is I'll expand Files
and then navigate to a location of your choice.
I want to create my folder in the Home directory,
so I'll right click where it says Files Home,
then select New,
then Folder.
I'll name this folder
Census Data Analysis
and click Save.
Once you have that folder ready to go,
we next need to upload the createdata.sas program
to this tutorial folder, and then run the program to create the data that we need for this tutorial series.
This program is included in the tutorial materials you downloaded.
To upload the SAS program into my SAS environment,
I'll select the Census Data Analysis folder
and then click on the Upload icon.
Next up, click Choose Files
and then I'll navigate to my createdata.sas program.
Select it,
click Open,
and then select Upload.
So now whenever I expand my Census Data Analysis folder,
I'll see that createdata.sas program available.
I'm going to go ahead and double click on that program
to open it up in a new tab in the work area.
Now, before running this program, we need to specify the path to that
Census Data Analysis folder that we just created.
The easiest way to retrieve that path
is to right click on the Census Data Analysis folder
and then select Properties.
Go ahead and highlight the location box,
select Control C on your keyboard,
and then select Close.
Now with that path copied,
in the program, I'm going to come to the line that says
%LET path=insertpath;
all you need to do is highlight where it says insertpath,
and then go ahead and select Control V on your keyboard
to paste in that path that we just copied.
That is the only change that you need to make to this program,
so go ahead and click Run. There's a little running man icon.
So on the generated report on the Results tab, you should see that nine tables are listed in the report.
If you go and actually take a look at your Census Data Analysis folder,
you'll see those nine tables listed in a folder
along with three Excel files. You'll
see educationattainment_s,
medianhomevalue_s, and then totalpopulation_s there.
When you use point-and-click tasks in SAS Studio,
you often need to specify an input SAS table to use,
or an output SAS table to save the output information.
The location of these tables often needs to be specified in the form of a library.
Now, a library is simply just a shortcut or a pointer to a collection of SAS tables that are in a particular location.
So what I'm going to do is in order to create an access SAS tables in the Census Data Analysis folder,
I'm going to create a library pointing to that folder.
The easiest way to do this is to right click the Census Data Analysis folder,
select Create, and select Library.
I'll name the library Census
and I'm also going to check this checkbox that says, "Re-create this library at start-up."
Now, what usually happens is with user-defined libraries,
whenever you close out of SAS Studio, those user-defined libraries are deleted.
So to make sure that I always have the Census library available to me,
I just need to select this checkbox so that it's always getting re-created.
All right. I'll click OK.
You now have access to SAS Studio and the tutorial data,
so you're almost ready to start the video series.
One last thing I want to mention is the tutorial notes.
The tutorial notes contain not only the steps you'll see in the videos,
but also practices for you to try out what you've learned.
There are even challenge practices that will go beyond what you'll see in the videos
so that you can learn about other techniques you can use to analyze census data.
You can find the PDF tutorial notes in the tutorial materials that you downloaded
or on the main tutorial page.
Now you're ready to follow along with the Analyzing Census Data in SAS Studio tutorial series.
You have all the data you need to jump into any video you're interested in.
But for the best experience, I recommend watching the videos in order.
Let's get started.