Important SAS Interview Questions and Answers

1. What areas of SAS are you most interested in?
2. Why is SAS considered self-documenting?
3.  Name and describe three SAS functions that you have used, if any?
   

1. What do the SAS log messages "numeric values have been converted to character" mean? What are the implications?
2. What SAS statements would you code to read an external raw data file to a DATA step?
3. If reading a variable length file with fixed input, how would you prevent SAS from reading the next record if the last variable didn’t have a value?
4. What statement do you code to tell SAS that it is to write to an external file? What statement do you code to write the record to the file?
5. If you’re not wanting any SAS output from a data step, how would you code the data statement to prevent SAS from producing a set?
6. Have you ever linked SAS code? If so, describe the link and any required statements used to either process the code or the step itself. ?
7. If you have a data set that contains 100 variables, but you need only five of those, what is the code to force SAS to use only those variable?
8. Does SAS ‘Translate’ (compile) or does it ‘Interpret’? Explain.
9. At compile time when a SAS data set is read, what items are created?
10. Briefly describe 5 ways to do a "table lookup" in SAS.
11. What versions of SAS have you used (on which platforms)?
12. What are some good SAS programming practices for processing very large data sets?
13. What are some problems you might encounter in processing missing values? In Data steps? Arithmetic? Comparisons? Functions? Classifying data?
14. What is the order of application for output data set options, input data set options and SAS statements?
15. How do you debug and test your SAS programs?
16. What can you learn from the SAS log when debugging?
17. Have you ever used the SAS Debugger?
18. What SAS features do you use for error trapping and data validation?
19. How does SAS handle missing values in: assignment statements, functions, a merge, an update, sort order, formats, PROCs?