24.7 - Creating SAS Data Sets from Procedure Output

You may recall in the first part of Stat 483 that we used an OUTPUT statement in the MEANS procedure to create a data set containing summary statistics, such as means and standard deviations. We'll see in this section that we could have alternatively used ODS to first save the summary statistics and then send it to the OUTPUT destination. In fact, we can use ODS to save just about any part of any procedure's output!

Example 24.11

The following program uses an ODS OUTPUT statement to create a temporary SAS data set called summout from the Summary output object created by the MEANS procedure, and then prints the resulting summout data set:

PROC MEANS data = golfbypar;
        by par;
        var yards;
        title 'Pennsylvania Golf Courses by Par';
        ODS OUTPUT Summary = summout;
    RUN;
    PROC PRINT data = summout NOOBS;
        title 'The summout data set';
    RUN;

The summout data set
Par	Yards_N	Yards_Mean	Yards_StdDev	Yards_Min	Yards_Max
70	3	6283.3333333	295.66929724	6004	6593
71	3	6416.6666667	63.689350235	6369	6489
72	5	6840	235.55466457	6525	7123

Now, something that might not be obvious from this code is that the name of the output object, Summary, was determined from first tracing the MEANS procedure. If you refer back to the information SAS displayed in the log for Example 24.7, you can see that, since we want to capture all of the output from the MEANS procedure, the desired output object is called Summary. The ODS OUTPUT statement tells SAS that we want to save the data contained in the Summary output object in a data set called summout. Of course, the PRINT procedure then tells SAS to print the summout data set. Launch and run the SAS program, and review the output to convince yourself that the summout data set does indeed contain the data summarized by the MEANS procedure.

You do need to be careful where you put ODS statements in your program. For example, if rather than putting the ODS OUTPUT statement just before the MEAN procedure's RUN statement, we had instead put it after the MEAN procedure's RUN statement and before the PRINT procedure's PROC PRINT statement, we would not have captured the Summary data set. Instead, we would get the following Warning message:

WARNING: Output 'Summary' was not created. Make sure that the output
	Object name, label, or path is spelled corectly. Also
    	Verify that the appropriate procedute options are used to
    	produce the request output object. For example, verify that
    	the NOPRINT option is not used

You might want to move the ODS statement as described and re-run the SAS program just to see this for yourself.

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