Improving on a SAS programming pattern

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|March 23, 2012

Earlier this week I described a common programming pattern in the SAS macro language. The pattern sets up a loop for processing each distinct value of a classification variable. The program uses the PROC SQL SELECT INTO feature to populate SAS macro variables. The effect: you can roll your own [...]

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How many observations were processed by that last step?

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|March 15, 2012

A well-formed WHERE statement or subsetting IF can narrow down the output of your SAS DATA step. The SAS log does a good job of telling you how many records were processed by the action. For example, let’s look at this simple DATA step with my “poor man’s random sample”, [...]

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Export to Excel 2010 just got a little bit easier

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|January 25, 2012

In case you missed it, the first maintenance release for SAS 9.3 was recently released. Because we’re all friends here, you may call it “SAS 9.3M1″ for short. Maintenance releases are usually about fixing problems that SAS has found or that customers have reported. However, sometimes a new capability might [...]

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XCMD and SAS 9.3: working together again

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|September 1, 2011

It’s been a well-known limitation for a long time.  When you connect to a SAS session using SAS Enterprise Guide, shell commands (including X command, SYSTASK, and FILENAME PIPE) are off-limits because the default SAS invocation disables them.  It does this by including -NOXCMD as a command-line option. This makes [...]

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How to add HTMLBlue to your list of styles in SAS Enterprise Guide

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|August 2, 2011

One of the great innovations with SAS 9.3 is the focus on ODS statistical graphics. “Wait a minute,” you’re thinking, “weren’t ODS graphics added in SAS 9.2?” Yes, that’s true.  But with SAS 9.3 there is even more capability: more analytical SAS procedures support the graphs, and there are more [...]

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ODS Graphics: new features and bundling in SAS 9.3

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|July 14, 2011

Rick Wicklin created his own list of Five Interface and Graphics Features that Everyone Can Use. It’s a very good summary of what you’ll immediately notice when you use analytics procedures in SAS display manager: cool graphs turned on by default. For SAS Enterprise Guide users, you won’t see such [...]

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SAS 9.3: the list

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|July 12, 2011

Alison posted the Top 10 Reasons you should care about SAS 9.3. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it reflects just a sample of the thousands of features and tweaks that you’ll see in this new release. Even with SAS 9.2, I was nowhere near exhausting my backlog of blog topics…but [...]

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Computing age in SAS 9.3

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|July 12, 2011

It seems like such a simple problem: how can you reliably compute the age of someone or something? Susan lamented the subtle issues using the YRDIF function exactly 1.0356164384 years ago. Sure, you could write your own function for calculating such things, as I suggested 0.1753424658 years ago. Or you [...]

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Frequently asked questions about SAS 9.3 and SAS Enterprise Guide

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|July 8, 2011

As I write this, SAS 9.3 has not yet been “shipped”, but its release is imminent. I’ve already heard many questions about how SAS Enterprise Guide works with the new version, so I decided to write this “Frequently-soon-to-be-asked questions” document to help sort it out. What version of SAS Enterprise [...]

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