SAS Tips, Links & FAQs

Debugging SAS Programs

Graphing in SAS

The new ODS Graphics Designer allows you to create graphs in SAS® quickly and easily using an interactive "drag-and-drop" interface. It also provides considerable flexibility in graph creation and modification. The designer is available in SAS 9.4 and 9.3 as part of Base SAS, under the Tools menu.

A tutorial is available at http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/grstatdesign/61690/HTML/default/viewer.htm#titlepage.htm. If you would like to follow along with the examples in the tutorial using SAS on your PC, you must do the following before you launch the ODS Graphics Designer:

Download the zip archive file that contains the data files used in the tutorial.
Unzip the archive file (right-click on it and select Extract all), and place the resulting extracted files in a folder on your PC.
Launch SAS. In your SAS program window, execute a SAS libname command to create a libref named 'DESIGNER' which references the folder containing the extracted files, for example:
```
libname DESIGNER 'C:\MyExtractionFolder';
```
In your SAS program window, open and execute the Formats.sas file, which is one of the files that was extracted in step 2 above.
Launch the ODS Graphics Designer, as instructed in the tutorial, and follow along with the tutorial.

SAS/GRAPH® was the method used for graphing in SAS before the release of SAS® 9.2. After using SAS/STAT to output data sets and tables, users could then code using SAS/GRAPH to produce desired graphs.

ODS Statistical Graphics became available with the 9.2 release and has been enhanced in SAS 9.3 and 9.4. Through the inclusion of an ODS statement in the program, graphics are automatically produced when using SAS/STAT®.

The SAS® 9.2 release also gave us new SAS/GRAPH® procedures. Some of these are SGPLOT, SGPANEL, and SGSCATTER.

Both SAS/GRAPH® and ODS Statistical Graphics provide the user with excellent, but different, graphing options. Note that some options available with SAS/GRAPH® may not be available when using ODS Graphics and vice versa.

ODS Graphics Documentation:

SAS/Graph Documentation:

SAS/Graph Documentation
A day in the Life of Data (SGF 2013 pdf)
Graph Your SAS Off (SGF 2013 pdf)
Secrets of the SG Procedures: SGPLOT, SGPANEL, and SGSCATTER (SGF 2009 pdf)
The Graph Template Language: Beyond SAS/Graph Procedures (SGF 2012 pdf)

Working Efficiently in SAS

Transferring Data

Moving Excel Data into SAS
How to export multiple SAS datasets to multiple sheets in Excel
How do I get DBMS/Copy to convert files to/from SAS format?
How to use SAS/Connect

Viewing SAS Files Without SAS

To view and perform other tasks with SAS files, without needing SAS on your PC. See: Build your own SAS data set viewer using PowerShell.

Helpful SAS Links

This article was updated: 09/24/2021