Every programmer makes errors. Therefore, learning to debug a program is an important part of learning to program. Another skill is learning to decipher cryptic error messages, which can be as hard to interpret as hieroglyphs. One helpful skill is learning to navigate a "traceback" error. A traceback error message
Here's a SAS tip for you. Most SAS programmers know that SAS provides syntax that makes it easy to specify a list of variables. For example, you can use the hyphen and colon operators to specify lists of variables on many SAS statements: You can use the hyphen operator (-)
In 2024, I wrote about 80 articles for The DO Loop blog. My most popular articles were about SAS programming, data visualization, and statistics. If you missed any of these articles, here is the "Reader's Choice Awards" for some of the most popular articles from 2024! SAS Programming The following
In a correlation analysis, it is common to consider the correlations between all pairs of numerical variables. That is, if there are k numerical variables, most people examine the complete k x k matrix of correlations. This matrix is symmetric and has 1s on the diagonal, so more than half of the
In SAS, range attribute maps enable you to specify the range of values that determine the colors used for graphical elements. There are various examples that use the GTL to define a range attribute map, but fewer examples that show how to use a range attribute map with PROC SGPLOT.
The INPUT function and PUT function in SAS are used to apply informats and formats (respectively) to data. For both functions, you must know in advance which informat or format you want to apply. For brevity, let's consider only applying a format. To use the PUT function, you must know
In SAS, the INPUT and PUT functions are powerful functions that enable you to convert data from character type to numeric type and vice versa. They work by applying SAS formats or informats to data. You cannot fully understand the INPUT and PUT functions without understanding formats and informats in
SAS software supports two kinds of procedures: interactive and non-interactive. Most SAS procedures are non-interactive. They begin with a PROC statement, include one or more additional statements, and end with a RUN statement. When SAS encounters the RUN statement, the procedure executes all statements, then exits. On the other hand,
In practice, there is no need to remember textbook formulas for the ANOVA test because all modern statistical software will perform the test for you. In SAS, the ANOVA procedure is designed to handle balanced designs (the same number of observations in each group) whereas the GLM procedure can handle
A previous article about how to display missing values in SAS prompted a comment about special missing values in ODS tables in SAS. Did you know that statistical tables in SAS include special missing values to represent certain situations in statistical analyses? This article explains how to interpret four special
