an additional advantage of SAS is that in can read-in from and output
data to multiple excel worksheets within an xls file
On 12/2/05, Joseph Coveney <[email protected]> wrote:
> In Michael Mitchell's "Strategically using General Purpose Statistics
> Packages: A Look at Stata, SAS and SPSS," he alludes to the superior ability
> of SAS to read complex data files. Excerpting from Page 20 of the technical
> report,
>
> "Complex raw data files
> Some raw data files are stored in a very complex format, perhaps having
> varying numbers of variables. Without a doubt, SAS is the most powerful tool
> for reading these kinds of complex data files and is the very best tool for
> reading very complex raw data files.
> Hierarchical data files
> . . . It is harder to read in such files in SAS, however you have additional
> power while reading the files in SAS. . Stata is the weakest program in this
> respect, being hard to use (probably equivalent to SAS in difficulty) but
> not offering the kind of additional power that you get in SAS."
>
> Does anyone on the List know of a publicly accessible (ideally, uncontrived)
> example of a complex data file that illustrates the advantages of SAS over
> SPSS, Stata, and other packages for reading these? If so, could you please
> post the URL? (Or the URL of a description of what such a data file would
> look like--perhaps something like an anecdote or case study illustrating
> the power of the DATA step with a particularly nasty example that some SAS
> user encountered.)
>
> I couldn't locate anything pertinent via the customary search engines. I'm
> not referring to EBCDIC, XML (or even SAS 6.04 dataset files, apparently,
> for that matter), but rather a file with a data organizational complexity
> that illustrates what Michael is talking about. Thank you.
>
> Joseph Coveney
>
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