SAS Insight Series in Australia and New Zealand (August 2011)

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|July 17, 2011

I feel privileged to have been invited back to meet with SAS customers throughout New Zealand and Australia. I also feel lucky to escape the North Carolina summer (with temperatures trending in the 90s Fahrenheit) in exchange for the “winter” weather Down Under. For a good chunk of August, I’ll [...]

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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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What SAS administrators should know about libraries, metadata, and SAS Enterprise Guide

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|June 21, 2011

We sometimes take it for granted, but the concept of the “SAS library” is just about one of the most awesome aspects of The SAS System. You can give your library a name (a library reference, or libref), tell the system how to get to your data (options on a [...]

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Top 10 head scratchers for DATA step programmers

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|April 22, 2011

When I encounter an ERROR, WARNING, or NOTE in my SAS log that I don’t understand, my first recourse is to ask my friend (we’ll call him “Google”) what it could mean. I copy the entire message (or at least 5 or 6 consecutive words from it) into the search [...]

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Putting the squeeze on your SAS data sets

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|February 17, 2011

I’ve known several people who were raised during the Great Depression, and I’ve observed that they are very mindful of waste. My wife’s grandmother used to save plastic bags, twist ties, and relatively clean aluminum foil for potential reuse in the household — because such materials were once scarce. The [...]

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New Goodies for SAS Programmers: View it now

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|February 4, 2011

Millions of Americans will be gathering around the television this Sunday to watch Super Bowl XLV. They’ll gather in bars and private homes, prepare billions of calories worth of snacks, and root for their favorite teams. But if you’re looking for an alternate form of entertainment, why not watch “New [...]

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Operators were standing by

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|February 1, 2011

Last week I presented a SAS Talks session for SAS programmers using SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. It was well attended, which pleased me. You never know how it’s going to go with a webinar. People register and sign in, but they are at their desks in their offices/cubicles/homes where distractions [...]

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Upcoming SAS Talks session for SAS programmers

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|January 6, 2011

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be presenting another SAS Talks session on January 27th, 2011 (this month!). This talk will focus on the cool stuff in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3, especially for the SAS programmer. Here’s some of what you’ll learn about: Syntax suggestion and autocomplete for the SAS [...]

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SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1: it's not dead yet

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|October 27, 2010

Are you up to date on your hotfixes for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1? If you’re not certain of the answer, you’ll find out next week when you might see this message appear: This version of SAS Enterprise Guide will expire on December 1st, 2010. If you’ve applied any SAS Enterprise [...]

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SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 Tutorials in your language

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|October 25, 2010

We’ve just pushed out the localized versions of the Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 tutorial. This is the tutorial that you’ll see when you select Help->Getting Started Tutorial from within SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is a list of the supported languages, and links to the tutorial content: English [...]

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