In the previous videos you learned some basic background information about SAS and its uses,
you saw a general overview of the programming process,
you dissected a SAS program into its component parts,
and you were introduced to a few best practices.
In the next video, you’ll actually begin writing your own SAS programs.
In this video, I’m going to first familiarize you with the SAS user interface.
While working on SAS programs you will primarily use six different windows:
the enhanced editor window,
the log window,
the output window,
the results window,
the explorer window,
and the results viewer window.
Let’s go ahead and dive right in.
Earlier we started SAS and saw that in the Windows operating environment five SAS windows are open by default.
They are, from left to right,
the results window [currently hidden],
the explorer window,
the output window,
the log window,
and the enhanced editor window.
I emphasize the enhanced editor window because there is a program editor window as well.
If you click on view in the menu bar you see a drop down menu with a list of different windows you can open.
Your first two options are the Enhanced Editor Window and the Program Editor Window.
I’m not going to get into the details, but they’re not the same, and you should always write your programs in an enhanced editor window.
And how can you tell if you’re using an enhanced editor window or not?
Well, you should see a little blue plus sign in the editor icon on the title bar.
And while we have the view menu open, just be aware that if you ever close a window by accident, you can open it again here.
In order to open a SAS program you first you need to check the title bar to make sure the editor window is active.
When active, it will be blue.
If it’s not active, just click anywhere in the window to activate it.
Then select file and open program.
When the open program dialog box appears, browse for the program you want to open.
Don’t worry about the code itself.
For now, just a get a feel for how to use the editor window to work with programs.
Notice that after a program opens, its file name is displayed in the title bar.
If you need more screen area to view your program,
you can click the maximize button in the upper right hand corner of the enhanced editor window.
If you want to shrink it back down to it’s original size just click the restore button that replaces the maximize button.
I generally like to work with my windows maximized.
If I need to see another window, like the log window, I can just click on the log tab at the bottom of the screen.
Next to the log tab is the output tab. Let’s go ahead and click on it.
This is the output window.
In versions of SAS prior to 9.3, by default all reports were generated in a format called listing output, and displayed in the output window.
Beginning with version 9.3 the default is now HTML output,
which as you have already seen, is displayed in the results viewer window.
The results viewer window is not currently showing because there are not currently any results to view.
So, let’s go ahead and run our program.
You already saw how to submit your program using the submit button on the SAS toolbar.
Now let’s submit it using the menu bar. To do this, click run, and then submit.
As you just saw, you can typically perform a given task several different ways in SAS.
This is an idea that we will revisit many times.
For example, we could have also issued a submit command in the command bar.
Now that we’ve submitted our program you see two other windows open.
The first is the results window, which provides a results tree.
We can expand this tree and view all the reports we’ve created in the current SAS session.
And again you see our list report and summary report in the results viewer window.
The final window I want to talk about now is the Explorer window.
We will primarily use the explorer window to view SAS libraries and SAS data sets.
We'll talk more about libraries in the future, but for now just know that this is where they are located.
And that concludes your brief tour of the SAS user interface.
As the semester progresses we’ll learn about other elements.
For the time being just make sure you know the six main windows we just discussed and what they are generally used for.