I made this hard on myself. The material is really very organized and straight forward, and I’m feeling pretty good about what I’ve accomplished this week. As an overview, I learned how to build this blog, and wrote my first SAS program. I had very good instructions and plenty of resources to complete both, but I still feel pretty good about my accomplishments.
How many times can you forget to add a semi-colon to the end of a SAS statement. I’m sure I’m in the triple digits. Also, spelling counts when you are writing a program. AAPL is not the same as APPL. I spent an embarrassing amount of time chasing that one down. Other, than self-inflicted wounds it was really pretty painless, and I’m starting to catch the vision of how powerful SAS can be….with a trained pilot flying her. Importing and exporting were pretty straight forward. The data transformation and calculation abilities of SAS are off the chart. The Lag function is awesome! Being able to do math on data from a defined number of records back is powerful. That’s not to bad to do in Excel, but really tough in databases. It’s even easier in SAS. Here’s a link to their website if you would like to know more.
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