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I'm considering teaching my introductory statistics course in SAS Enterprise Guide. I want my students to be able to calculate p-values and percentiles for various distributions (binomial, normal, t, chi-square) with the drop-down menus if at all possible. For example, is there a way to do both of:

DATA pval;
   pval=1-PROBBNML(0.5,25,15);
RUN;

PROC PRINT DATA=pval;
RUN;

and

DATA chi;
   qchi=CINV(0.95,4);
RUN;

PROC PRINT DATA=chi;
RUN;

via the drop-down menus?

Meg
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    I don't think there is :( For something like that Excel is an option though. If this is something that's important perhaps consider posting to communities.sas.com and one of the SAS EG developers can comment on the best way. – Reeza Jan 13 '15 at 04:57
  • Yes, I'm trying to get away from using Excel. Thanks for your input. – Meg Jan 13 '15 at 13:03
  • I don't think you could generate data through the drop down menus. But the above isn't all that difficult to do by programming, even for a non programmer, I wouldn't think. – Joe Jan 13 '15 at 15:26
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    No, it's not. And that's what I was considering having them do - just code it. I was just aiming for consistency since we have a single intro stat course for all majors and I wanted one package and either coding or drop-down, not a mix of both. But I think I'll just have them do the coding. It's also a matter of curiosity about whether SAS Enterprise can, in some way, do everything SAS can do, but via drop-down menus. – Meg Jan 13 '15 at 15:28
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    Drop down menu's get you about 75% of the way I find, the rest requires programming. Would you consider a custom add in task? That shouldn't be too difficult for this request, but would require admin rights to the computer the student was using. – Reeza Jan 13 '15 at 18:28
  • I won't have that "luxury" because students won't have admin rights, but at least I know that's an option for my own reference. Thanks everyone. – Meg Jan 14 '15 at 01:13
  • Also consider having your students use the free SAS University Edition: http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/university-edition.html – Leo Jan 14 '15 at 04:14
  • Okay - I'll look into that. Curious as to how it's different than SAS Enterprise Guide (other than I know it's free and thus students can have it on their own computers). – Meg Jan 15 '15 at 00:41
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    Wouldn't want to appear off-topic here, but if the SAS avenue seems less than satisfying, you might want to consider using R's Rcmdr (R-Commander) package which provides a graphical user interface with lots of things available through menus, p-values & percentiles for a wide range of distributions included. – Jason V Mar 17 '15 at 00:36

3 Answers3

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When you open a data set in SAS, there is a button at the top called 'Analyze'. This has some built in functions ,although they are a bit more advanced than calculating p values.

Victor
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There is in fact a way of adding dropdown menus in EG to do what you need and it is call PROMPTS.

You could have a prompt that let you select between normal and chi-square for example. You can have distribution paramaters static knowing that some won't apply in some distributions or make it dinamically depending on your selection.

here is a nice article re prompts how do you use a variable prompt

hope this helps

Altons
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You could create a new dataset (File/New/Data) and define parameters of the function as variables. You can then fill in one or several lines/examples with different parameters. Using 'query builder' then computed columns icon, you can create a new variable using the desired function (CINV, PROBBNML or other) which will store the result in a new dataset.

It would be better to use only one dataset by function but you can show the result for different values of the parameters which may be interesting for your students.

Christian Colot
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