Importing the SASUSER datasets in SAS Studio

I have been playing around with SAS for the last two weeks. I started with a SAS University Edition running on a VirtualBox instance on my MacBook, but soon realized that it was way more convenient to use a SAS OnDemand account. Having made the switch, I realized that all learning materials made references to and used examples with datsets from a library named SASUSER.

It was not clear how to get these datasets and use them in SAS Studio. After a bunch of searches, I found this page that pointed at data set up scripts for these datasets. The URL it pointed to had of course been repurposed and now redirected to a marketing page. After going back through multiple versions of the page on Internet Archive, I finally managed to find a snapshot that linked to a set up file that worked.

Here are the steps to use the setup script:

• Download the script. Depending on the version of the material you are using, you may want to grab an older snapshot from the Internet Archive.
• Rename the file so that it’s extension is changed to .sas.
• Create a directory under your home directory in SAS Studio, for example sasuser.
• Upload the sample data script from step 1 to this folder, using the web interface.

• Create a new SAS source file named libname.sas with the following content:

  libname sasuser "~/sasuser";

• Execute this script.

• Now execute the sample data script.

• It should create all the datsets you need in the library named sasuser. You can verify this using the following script:

  proc contents data=sasuser._all_ nods;
  run;