Anyone who uses SAS (or doesn’t) probably has their own reasons. I have a few but a major one is the ease of importing just about any type of data. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are multiple types of consultants. I’m the type who is, literally, all over the map. I’ve been in five countries this year and I think 11 states plus the District of Columbia, but I might have left off a couple. I said 9 in a post on a different blog where I occasionally write about my life and judo<\/a>, but then I remembered I’d been in Texas for SAS Global Forum where I gave a talk on biostatistics<\/a> and also in New Mexico speaking on transition from school to work for tribal youth with disabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What that means is that I work with a wide range of organizations and their data is not all in the same format. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re a consultant who works consistently with one client, data formats may not be your biggest issue. You probably wrote a program to read in that data, no matter what messy format it was in and you’re good to go. In my case, though, every dataset, every project is different. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the previous post, I mentioned reading in the IPEDS data<\/a>, which is a relatively small public data set (around 7,000 x 60). Fantastically, that came with a SAS program so all I needed to do was upload the raw data file and change the INFILE statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIf you work with a wide range of clients, ease of data import matters<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
All the data, all the time<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Proc import does not a consultant make<\/h3>\n\n\n\n