Chapter 3 Importing Data
Your first step in using SAS to summarize and analyze data is to create a SAS data set. If your data is available electronically, SAS can almost certainly import it.
SAS provides many features for reading external data files, some of which differ based on your operating system. This chapter discusses a few basic features. If your data cannot be imported using the techniques in this chapter, then see SAS documentation or other references for more information. (See Appendix 1, “Further Reading,” for suggestions.)
If your data is in an electronic form, it’s worth the extra time to investigate ways to import it, instead of entering the data all over again. Importing data improves the overall data quality because quality ...