+Chris Hemedinger is the Director of SAS User Engagement, which includes our SAS Communities and SAS User Groups. Since 1993, Chris has worked for SAS as an author, a software developer, an R&D manager and a consultant. Inexplicably, Chris is still coasting on the limited fame he earned as an author of SAS For Dummies.
SAS power users (and actually, power users of any application) like to customize their environment for maximum productivity. Long-time SAS users remember the KEYS window in SAS display manager, which allows you to assign SAS commands to "hot keys" in your SAS session. These users will invest many hours to
If you spend a lot of time in SAS Enterprise Guide (as I do), you probably get to know its features pretty well. But we don't always take the time to explore as we should, so there might be a few golden nuggets of editor knowledge that have escaped you
One of the big benefits of SAS Viya is how approachable it is for programmers of other languages. You don't have to learn SAS in order to become productive quickly. We've seen a lot of interest from people who code in Python, maybe because that language has become known for
When SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office was first created over a decade ago, SAS programmers were told to check their skills at the door. This new product was for non-programmers only. SAS programmers were invited to contribute to the experience by packaging their code in SAS stored processes, which end
In his recent article Perceptions of probability, Rick Wicklin explores how vague statements about "likeliness" translate into probabilities that we can express numerically. It's a fun, informative post -- I recommend it! You'll "Almost Certainly" enjoy it. To prepare the article, Rick first had to download the source data from
Every day before I even wake up, I have little "SAS robots" that do work for me. These are SAS batch jobs that gather data from external services and build data marts, generate reports, and send e-mail. One of those SAS jobs gathers Google Analytics data about our SAS blogs
Thanks to a new open source project from SAS, Python coders can now bring the power of SAS into their Python scripts. The project is SASPy, and it's available on the SAS Software GitHub. It works with SAS 9.4 and higher, and requires Python 3.x. I spoke with Jared Dean
Did you know that PROC SQL captures the record count for a result set in a special automatic macro variable? When you create a subset of data to include in a report, it's a nice touch to add a record count and other summaries as an eye-catcher to the report
Colors are the subject of many romantic poems and songs, but there isn't much romance to be found in their hexadecimal values. With apologies to Van Morrison: ...Skipping and a jumping In the misty morning fog with Our hearts a thumpin' and you My cx662F14 eyed girl When it comes
At SAS, we've published more repositories on GitHub as a way to share our open source projects and examples. These "repos" (that's Git lingo) are created and maintained by experts in R&D, professional services (consulting), and SAS training. Some recent examples include: sas_kernel, which provides Jupyter notebook support for SAS.
TL; DR Free training from SAS: "SAS Programming for R Users." Check the available Live Web offerings and register for one that fits your schedule. Or use the free e-Learning version and learn at your own pace. The complete course materials are on the SAS Software GitHub space and you
JSON is the new XML. The number of SAS users who need to access JSON data has skyrocketed, thanks mainly to the proliferation of REST-based APIs and web services. Because JSON is structured data in text format, we've been able to offer simple parsing techniques that use DATA step and
In my earlier post about WHERE and IF statements, I announced that the DATA step debugger has finally arrived in SAS Enterprise Guide. (I admit that I might have buried the lead in that post.) Let's use this post to talk about the new debugger and how it works. First,
In the DATA step, the WHERE statement and the IF statement (a.k.a. the "subsetting IF") have similar functions. In many scenarios, they produce identical results. But new SAS programmers are taught early on that these two statements work very differently, and in important ways. To understand the differences, it helps
Rick Wicklin showed us how to visualize the ages of US Presidents at the time of their inaugurations. That's a pretty relevant thing to do, as the age of the incoming president can indirectly influence aspects of the president's term, thanks to health and generational factors. As part of his
I've supplied dozens of custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide, but the Copy Files task is easily the most popular. The Copy Files task allows you to capture "file transfer" steps inside your process flow, so that you can automate any file upload and download operations between your PC and
SAS Community member @tc (a.k.a. Ted Conway) has found a new toy: ODS Graphics. Using PROC SGPLOT and GTL (Graph Template Language), along with some creative data prep steps, Ted has created several fun examples that show off what you can do with a bit of creativity, some math knowledge,
Have you seen this error when running a program in SAS Enterprise Guide? ERROR: You cannot open WORK.YOURDATA.DATA for output access with member-level control because WORK.YOURDATA.DATA is in use by you in resource environment IOM ROOT COMP ENV. Or maybe: ERROR: A lock is not available for LIB.YOURDATA.DATA. NOTE: The
SAS programmers often resort to using the X command to list the contents of file directories and to process the contents of ZIP files. In centralized SAS environments, the X command is unavailable to most programmers. NOXCMD is the default setting for these environments (disallowing shell commands), and SAS admins
SAS releases regular updates to software products in the form of hot fixes and maintenance releases. Hot fixes are SAS' timely response to customer-reported problems, as well as a way to deliver occasional security-related updates that can affect any software product. At SAS we call them "hot fixes." Other companies
First, if you landed on this topic because you encountered this SAS message: ERROR 180-322: Statement is not valid or it is used out of proper order. ...then I'll tell you right now: you've probably left off a semicolon in one of your SAS statements. If you're lucky, the SAS
My computer geek colleagues are boasting about their humble beginnings by sharing lists of their first seven programming languages. You can find these under the hashtag #FirstSevenLanguages. COBOLPL/1SASIFPSAPL370 AssemblerCSQLLisp#FirstSevenLanguages — Paul Kent (@hornpolish) August 16, 2016 From what I've seen of these lists, the programming languages that appear are very
A colleague approached me with this very important business problem: Every Friday at SAS HQ, SAS cafe staff provides a breakfast goodie in our breakrooms. Often the supplied goodie is delicious, but sometimes it's more...well...healthy. I want to know whether I should eat my breakfast before I leave home on
Slack is a tremendously popular app for team collaboration. At its core, it's an open messaging app that allows team members to communicate with each other in real time. It works well with "startup"-style teamwork, which requires constant communication among people who aren't always located together. I've heard a lot
Today is #EmbraceYourGeekness day, and you are either reveling in this new crazy town inhabited by Pokémon GO, or you are hiding in your house trying to avoid all of the Pokémon GO zombies wandering around. But since I'm living in SAS these days -- not just the place (at
I've been working on a SAS program that can add content to the SAS Support Communities (more on that in a future post). Despite my 20+ years of SAS experience, there are a lot of SAS programming tricks that I don't know. Or that I use so infrequently that I
Would you like to see the latest features of SAS Enterprise Guide in action? Of course you would! That's why it's well worth the 12 minutes of your time to watch this video from SAS Global Forum 2016. In the video, Casey Smith (SAS' R&D manager of the SAS Enterprise
One thing that we have a lot of at SAS: installations of SAS software that we can run. I have SAS for Windows on my laptop, and I have access to many centralized instances of SAS that run on Linux and Windows servers. (I also have access to mainframe SAS,
SAS Technical Support has earned a wonderful reputation for being friendly, knowledgeable, and thorough. Every customer that I talk to is delighted by the experience. That's why what I'm about to say might be heresy, but here it goes. If you have a question about how to accomplish a task
Yesterday a frustrated SAS user complained on Twitter. He's working with a database that stores an ID field as a big long number (perhaps using the database BIGINT type), and SAS can't display a number greater than 15 digits. Well, it's actually 16 digits, depending on the value: %put Biggest
