Wiley SAS For Dummies, 2nd Edition 978-0-470-53968-2 Manuel D’Utilisation

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978-0-470-53968-2
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Part I: Welcome to SAS! 
a bit rough; but before long, word of this software and its capabilities began 
to spread, revenues increased, and the company began to grow. As of this 
writing, SAS has enjoyed 33 consecutive years of revenue growth and profit-
ability. They must be doing something right.
This chapter is an overview of the power and flexibility of SAS for a range of 
applications and industries. SAS has expanded from being just a program-
ming language for experts to meeting the needs of a wide variety of users in 
almost every industry and country in the world.
Isn’t SAS Just for Gurus?
You might assume that you need to be a statistician or math guru to use SAS, 
but happily that’s not the case. In the last few years, SAS has made a signifi-
cant investment in making the unparalleled analytical and data management 
capabilities developed over 30-plus years available to almost anyone with a 
problem to solve in business, science, or government. With recent products 
such as SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, SAS 
has never been more accessible or flexible. These products provide user-
friendly interfaces and wizards to maximize the heavy-duty capabilities that 
SAS has long provided to gurus!
Most of this book is dedicated to simple-to-understand principles that are full 
of possibilities and limited only by your situation and imagination. SAS offers 
so much potential that this book just scratches the surface and gets you up 
to speed on the basics.
Data, Data Everywhere — 
But Not Where I Need It!
The glamorous side of business intelligence and data analysis is all the gee-
whiz reports, graphs, and impressive statistics you can present. (It must be 
true because my p-value says so! And don’t worry if you don’t know what a 
p-value is right now. That will come later.) The surprising secret of actually 
arriving at good results for decision-making is the huge amount of time that 
many people spend accessing, organizing, and preparing their data for a par-
ticular analysis. We’ve found a common theme in our visits to more than 50 
major companies: the massive amount of resource and rework time spent on 
the data preparation aspect of business analytics.
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