Your First Program

Open a new program in SAS Studio and type:

data _null_;
   put 'Hello, world!';
   put 'Welcome to SAS.';
run;

Press F3. The RESULTS tab stays empty — PUT writes to the log. Open the LOG tab; below the echoed lines of your program you'll see:

Hello, world!
Welcome to SAS.
NOTE: DATA statement used (Total process time):
      real time           0.00 seconds
      cpu time            0.00 seconds

• data _null_; starts a DATA step that doesn't create a data set — handy for calculations and messages.
• put writes text (or values) to the log.
• run; ends the step and runs it.
• Every statement ends with a semicolon. Forgetting one is the most common SAS mistake.
• SAS keywords and names are not case-sensitive: DATA, data, and Data are the same. Text inside quotes is kept exactly as written.

(Timing lines like the ones above appear after every step; later examples leave them out and are marked "log (abridged)".)

Your first data set and report

data pets;
   input name $ species $ age;
   datalines;
Rex dog 4
Tom cat 7
Nemo fish 1
;
run;

proc print data=pets;
run;

Output:

Obs    name    species    age

  1    Rex     dog          4
  2    Tom     cat          7
  3    Nemo    fish         1

• The DATA step creates a data set called pets with three variables (columns) and three observations (rows).
• input names the variables; the $ after name and species makes them character variables. age is numeric.
• datalines; starts the data, and a line containing only ; ends it.
• proc print displays the data set. Obs is the observation number.

Practice

Create a data set books with a title (one word) and a number of pages for three books, and print it.

data books;
   input title $ pages;
   datalines;
Dune 412
Emma 474
Ulysses 730
;
run;

proc print data=books;
run;

Obs    title      pages

  1    Dune         412
  2    Emma         474
  3    Ulysses      730