Resources

Workflow vocabulary, a PROC reference, the log guide, and SAS access

These are the reference pages to keep open while you read the week notes and work the labs — the SAS workflow vocabulary, the procedures laid side by side, the guide to reading the log and verifying output, and how to get into a SAS environment and organize a project. They support the throughline of the whole course: move from messy data to documented, rerunnable analytic results, and read the log, check the row counts, and verify before you trust output.

Important

SAS is shown here, not executed. Across this site every SAS program, every log excerpt, and every PROC output table is hand-authored and synthetic — SAS is proprietary and is not run in this build. Code appears as static, syntax-highlighted ```sas text; logs and output appear as typed listings labelled “synthetic.” A rendered listing is not evidence the code ran or that the numbers are right. Every page carries verified: false and a verification-status section.

The reference pages

  • SAS workflow glossary — the vocabulary the whole course leans on: library and libref, dataset (libref.name), observation versus variable, label, format versus informat, the PDV, character versus numeric, missing values (. and blank " "), and the log levels NOTE / WARNING / ERROR — each with a plain-language meaning and why it is load-bearing.
  • PROC reference — the course procedures placed side by side: PROC IMPORT, CONTENTS, FREQ, MEANS, UNIVARIATE, SQL, SORT, TTEST, GLM, REG, LOGISTIC, TRANSPOSE, SGPLOT, SURVEYSELECT, and the ODS destinations — what each is for, what it expects, what it returns, and the verification check to run after it. A pointer to which procedure answers which analytic question, not a syntax dump.
  • Log & verification guide — how to read the SAS log as primary output: the NOTE / WARNING / ERROR distinction, the load-bearing lines to check (observations read, observations created, a many-to-many MERGE warning, a bad informat, a silent character-to-numeric conversion), and the verification habits — confirm row counts before and after a join, check variable types, look at NMISS, and ask “could someone else rerun and verify this?”
  • SAS access & project setup — how to reach a SAS environment (SAS Studio via SAS OnDemand for Academics, SAS Viya for Learners, SAS Skill Builder for Students, or a university-supported install) and how to organize an analysis project — a libname to a permanent data folder, options you rely on, named program files, and a verification-notes section. This is also where the SAS-access caveat lives: the course-designated SAS environment is a syllabus placeholder, and a provisioned student account is not yet confirmed.

How to use these together

Read them in the order a workflow actually unfolds. Start with the glossary so the vocabulary on every page lands — knowing that a date is a numeric value displayed with a format, or that participant_id is numeric while sex is character, saves you from the classic traps. Reach for the PROC reference when you need to pick the procedure that fits the question: a two-group comparison of systolic_bp by arm is a PROC TTEST; three sites is a PROC GLM / ANOVA; a 1/0 outcome like goal_met is a PROC LOGISTIC. Keep the log & verification guide open whenever you run a step, because the log — not the output window — is where SAS tells you the truth, and the row count is where a broken join confesses (the recurring 594-row inner join versus the 596-row left join). Visit SAS access & project setup once at the start to get into an environment and lay out your folders, then again whenever you organize a new analysis.

Everything on these pages uses the same recurring teaching dataset as the week notes — the synthetic, observational wellness-program study (“RiverCity Wellness,” seed streaminit(20260824)): 210 raw participant rows cleaned to 200 unique participants, joined to 594 screening rows. It is not real health data, and any result shown — a mean, a t statistic, an odds ratio — is invented for teaching.

Reading and source pointer

These reference pages point you toward the official SAS documentation (documentation.sas.com, support.sas.com) for the procedures and options the course uses, and — on the statistical-procedure weeks (9, 10, 11) — toward the open Introduction to Modern Statistics (IMS), 2nd ed. (Çetinkaya-Rundel & Hardin, CC BY-SA 3.0, openintro-ims.netlify.app) for the statistical background behind t-tests, ANOVA, regression, and logistic regression. “Learning to check the documentation” is itself a course skill: each page names the relevant SAS doc page as a reading pointer, in the course’s own words, so you practise finding the authoritative syntax yourself. These notes are the course’s own synthesis: grounded in the SAS documentation and open statistics references, but not copied from them. SAS® and all SAS Institute product names are the property of SAS Institute Inc.

Verification & reproducibility status

verified: false. This is an orientation page, so it carries no statistical results of its own; the load-bearing numbers it references — 210 raw rows, 200 cleaned participants, 594 screening rows, the 594 inner-join versus 596 left-join counts, and the synthetic seed streaminit(20260824) — are the locked values of the wellness-program study and are hand-authored, synthetic, and were NOT run. SAS is proprietary and is not executed in this build, so any SAS code, log line, or output table shown on the pages this links to is static teaching material, not a verified run. The course SAS execution/output gate is BLOCKED; a rendered code block or typed listing is not evidence the code runs or the numbers are right. Do not treat any value as a confirmed reference until the human/SAS-run sign-off in the course’s private notation and verification ledger §5 is complete.

Public vs. graded

These notes, the SAS examples, and the practice here are public and ungraded — study material only. No graded prompts, answer keys, rubrics, point values, or due dates appear on this site. Graded SAS workflow checkpoints, skill checks, homework, analytics labs, the midterm practical, the final analytics project, and the final practical live in Blackboard (the LMS), which is authoritative for due dates, submissions, and grades. If this page and Blackboard ever disagree, follow Blackboard.

See also