How can you generate a summary report of data using PROC MEANS?

Generating a summary report in SAS using PROC MEANS is effectively accomplished by utilizing the CLASS statement. The CLASS statement allows you to define categorical variables that will be used to group the data when calculating summary statistics. This means that for each unique value of the categorical variable(s) specified in the CLASS statement, PROC MEANS will compute the desired statistics, such as the mean, standard deviation, minimum, and maximum for the numeric variables in the dataset.

By providing this structure, you can obtain a summary report that is segmented by the categories of interest. For instance, if you have a dataset that represents sales data across different regions, using the CLASS statement with the 'region' variable will give you summaries for each region. This capability makes analyzing differences between subgroups straightforward and helps in deriving insights from the data.

Other approaches, such as executing a RUN statement or sorting the data beforehand, do not inherently provide the summary report capabilities. The RUN statement simply indicates the end of a PROC step and executes the previously defined code but does not affect the output itself. Similarly, while sorting the data might be helpful in certain analyses, it is not a requirement for generating summary statistics with PROC MEANS. The use of PROC SQL is also an alternative method for data