SAS VERSION 9 DATA SETS PORTABLE
SAS VERSION 9 DATA SETS CODE

You are not required to own the book in order to use the examples (but I promise that you can learn a lot from the book). The 'Data set->DATA step' example is featured in 'Chapter 12: Abracadabra: Turn Your Data into a SAS Program'. You can download the task from the list of custom task examples that accompany my recent book.

SAS VERSION 9 DATA SETS CODE

(If you're wondering how I'm 'splitting' the code view in this picture, check out this blog post about an editor trick.) And the contents of the Code tab in the results will contain the complete DATA step program. It doesn't actually run the program, since that would only recreate a copy of the data set that you already have, but it does produce a short summary log for output. When you click Run, the task builds a program that contains the DATA step along with all of the DATALINES records. If you want just the data structure portion of the program, you can click Copy to clipboard and thus capture just that piece. This screen shows the task user interface, which gives you a preview of the DATA step setup. (The task runs in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 and later.) This task reads the contents of the active data set, generates a DATA step program with the appropriate ATTRIB statements for each column, and then includes all of the data records as DATALINES. There are various programming approaches that you can use to accomplish this in SAS, but to make it easier I built a custom task called Data set->DATA step. Capture the structure of the data, with the columns, formats, labels, and lengths - even if you don't need all of the records.(Of course, you can also use PROC MIGRATE for this job.)

SAS VERSION 9 DATA SETS PORTABLE

Create a portable version of the data that you can transport from one SAS environment and use easily on another environment, without having to worry about platform encoding differences.

Build standalone program examples that include the data 'inline', so that you don't have to supply a SAS7BDAT file and a SAS program file together to make it work.

It's kind of like creating a 'freeze-dried' version of the data that you can carry around and use anywhere, re-hydrating it in the SAS session where you next need it. Sometimes I need to 'disassemble' a SAS data set into a DATA step program.

Sas version 9 data sets