DsView - Help

Version 0.3, 2015-02-13

DsView: a Windows viewer for datasets in the SAS7BDAT file format, as produced by the SAS System, the World Programming System, StatTransfer and others.

This page will be updated with information on how to use DsView, how to resolve common problems, etc. We have designed DsView to be very intuitive to use, so we hope you won't need much detailed help on the basic operations, but this page will highlight some of the less obvious features and explain how to use them.

Grouping

The Grouping feature in DsView changes the background colour of blocks of records according to the value of the current 'grouping column'. If your dataset has blocks of records relating to a particular patient, for example, you can set 'PATIENT' as the grouping column, and you will then see that all the records for the first PATIENT have one background color, the second patient's have a different colour, the third patient's records go back to the original background colour, and so on. This means that when you scroll left and right in your data, you can still see where each patient's data starts and ends, even if the PATIENT column is off-screen.

Grouping will automatically be enabled on the USUBJID column for any dataset that contains USUBJID; otherwise grouping will initially be turned off. To enable grouping on a particular column, right-click on the column's header and select Group on column.

Currently, grouping only works on one column at a time, but we may expand this in future so that you can group on combinations of columns, such as USUBJID and LBTESTCD.