Commonly Asked SAS Interview Questions with Answer : 56 - 60

Ques 56 : What is the use of MEANS Procedure in SAS and what are the defaults statistics for it ?

Ans : The MEANS Procedure (PROC MEANS) is to get summarized data by computing descriptive statistics for numeric variables on across all observations.

PROC MEANS produced five statistics by default which are given below :
1. N (Number of non-missing values)
2. MEAN
3. STD DEV (Standard Deviation)
4. MINIMUM
5. MAXIMUM



Ques 57 : What are the basic difference between PROC MEANS and PROC SUMMARY in SAS ?

Ans : PROC MEANS with NOPRINT option is just like as PROC SUMMARY.

The basic difference between both is : By default, PROC SUMMARY creates an output dataset while PROC MEANS produces a printed output.



Ques 58 : What are the NULL data sets and DEFAULT data sets in SAS ?

Ans : There are three types of special SAS Data Sets in SAS :
1. Null Data sets : _NULL_

2. Default Data sets : _LAST_

3. Automatic naming convention Data sets : DATAn

* for DATAn, Kindly refer : Question 17



Ques 59 : What is the use of PUT and INPUT function in SAS ?

Ans : PUT Function : It converts numeric values to character values and it requires FORMAT.

INPUT Function : It converts character values to numeric values and it requires INFORMAT.

Proc contents output of Data set R:

Ques 60 : How can we count the number of missing values of numeric variable in a SAS data set ?

Ans : To count the number of missing values for numeric variable, We could use MEANS Procedure with NMISS option.


PROC MEANS DATA=DSN NMISS;
VAR NUMV;
RUN;