SAS Online Manuals

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In earlier versions of PC Windows SAS, the Online Help features gave almost no detail about the theory behind SAS output, the formulas that SAS uses for its estimated values and P-values, and not even a complete listing of available SAS options. However, the current Help in PC Windows SAS version 9.1 is much better.

In olden times, SAS had 20 or so main printed manuals that, together, took up around 10 feet of shelf space. These manuals not only explained all of the options in SAS procedures and datasteps in detail, they also had detailed explanations of the statistical theory behind the options. The statistical explanations were often a bit condensed, but they were generally complete and had references to textbooks and journal articles. (A few procedures just had references to textbooks or journal articles, but these were the minority.) Most of this material is now in the PC Windows SAS Help files. (More exactly, click on Help on the main menu bar then SAS Help and Documentation.)

If you are connecting to a UNIX version of SAS over a telnet-like connection, then you will not have access to these help files. However, the (former) SAS main printed manuals are available on the SAS Institute Web site at:
http://v8doc.sas.com/sashtml

If a logon screen appears (I haven't seen it for a year or two), enter
Username:   onlinedoc
Password:   sas

More recently, the manuals were available as a separate distribution in either HTML and PDF format that you could obtain either from SAS or on a separate CD-ROM from Network Technology Services on campus. However, the current version of PC Windows SAS (Version 9) appears to have most of this information available in an easily accessible form through its Help feature.

This is reflected in the size of the currently installed Windows SAS: A few years back, both the printed manuals in HTML form and the total PC SAS total installation each took up about 260Mb on a computer hard disk. The current PC Windows SAS takes up about 1Gb on a computer hard disk, but appears to contain everything in the previous printed manuals, and also has better indexing and Search features.

Last modified October 2, 2005