
It was chosen to have two categorical and two continuous variables, so that we could test a variety of basic statistical techniques. To present the results, we will use a small example. We decided to do some testing to see how well Excel would serve as a Data Analysis application. As a result, if you suddenly find you need to do some statistical analysis, you may turn to it as the obvious choice. It is easily used to do a variety of calculations, includes a collection of statistical functions, and a Data Analysis ToolPak. Newly purchased computers often arrive with Excel already loaded. IntroductionĮxcel is probably the most commonly used spreadsheet for PCs. However when you are ready to do the statistical analysis, we recommend the use of a statistical package such as SAS, SPSS, Stata, Systat or Minitab. Output is poorly organized, sometimes inadequately labeled, and there is no record of how an analysis was accomplished.Įxcel is convenient for data entry, and for quickly manipulating rows and columns prior to statistical analysis.Many analyses can only be done on one column at a time, making it inconvenient to do the same analysis on many columns.Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses.Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly.The problems we encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas: We concluded that Excel is a poor choice for statistical analysis beyond textbook examples, the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. We used Excel to do some basic data analysis tasks to see whether it is a reasonable alternative to using a statistical package for the same tasks.
#Sas statistical software data input from excel code#
When the above code is executed, we get the following output.University of Massachusetts School of Public Health '/folders/myfolders/TutorialsPoint/empdtls.txt' dlm = ':' To read the hierarchical file we use the below code in which we identify the header record with an IF clause and use a do loop to process the details record. The first record is the header record mentioning the department and the next record few records starting with DTLS are the details record. In the below file the details of each employee under each department is listed. Below is an illustration of a hierarchical file. The number of details records can vary from one observation to another. For a given observation there is a header record below which many detail records are mentioned. In these files the data is present in hierarchical format. The above code reads the data from excel file and gives the same output as above two file types. "/folders/myfolders/TutorialsPoint/emp.xls" Assuming the file emp.xls is available locally in the SAS environment. As seen in the chapter SAS data sets, it can handle a wide variety of file types including MS excel. SAS can directly read an excel file using the import facility. When the above code is executed, we get the following output. '/folders/myfolders/sasuser.v94/TutorialsPoint/emp.csv' dlm="," In the below example we read the data file named emp.csv from the local environment. In this case we use the dlm option in the infile statement. These are the data files in which the column values are separated by a delimiting character like a comma or pipeline etc. Input empID empName $ Salary Dept $ DOJ date9. '/folders/myfolders/sasuser.v94/TutorialsPoint/emp_data.txt' In the below example we read the data file named emp_data.txt from the local environment. We read this file using the Infile statement available in SAS. Let’s consider an ASCII file containing the employee data. The data is usually delimited by a space, but there can be different types of delimiters also which SAS can handle. These are the files which contain the data on text format. The file formats used in SAS environment is discussed below. SAS can read data from various sources which includes many file formats.
