Take SAS program editor abbreviations to the next level

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|November 17, 2011

Rick posted a tip today about using abbreviations in the SAS program editor window (often referred to as the “enhanced editor”). Defining abbreviations is a great way to save keystrokes and re-use “templates” of code that you’ve squirreled away. (One of Rick’s readers also picked up on the tip, and [...]

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Do you mind if we dance with your DATEs (or DATETIMEs)?

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|November 15, 2011

I’ve been working with date-time data on a recent project, and I’ve come across a few SAS programs that have “opportunity for improvement” when it comes time to create reports. (Or maybe I haven’t, and I contrived this entire blog post so that I could reference one of my favorite [...]

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Calling Windows PowerShell from SAS: a simple example

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|September 15, 2011

As I mentioned in my introductory post about Windows PowerShell, you can use PowerShell commands as a simple and concise method to collect data from your Windows systems — information that is ripe for analysis within SAS. In this example, I’ll show a technique for using a SAS program to [...]

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Google Reader bundles for SAS-related blogs

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|September 7, 2011

I use Google Reader to keep up with SAS-related conversations on the blogosphere.   I thought it would be nice to share the lists of blogs that I follow as "shared bundles".  If you also use Google Reader, it will be very easy for you to add these bundles to [...]

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Using 3rd party shape files to build map charts in SAS

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|August 30, 2011

While talking to SAS users in Australia earlier this month, I often demonstrated the capabilities of the new Map Chart task in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. Creating map charts has never been easier: select your map data source, then select your response data source, and click Run. Voila! You’ve got [...]

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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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How to assign a library to the same path as your SAS Enterprise Guide project

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|July 11, 2011

SAS Enterprise Guide sets values for several useful SAS macro variables when it connects to a SAS session, including one macro variable, &_CLIENTPROJECTPATH, that contains the name and path of the current SAS Enterprise Guide project file. (To learn about this and other macro variables that SAS Enterprise Guide assigns, [...]

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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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Which tables contribute to that SAS information map?

Chris Hemedinger
Chris Hemedinger|June 25, 2011

About a year ago (wow, has it been that long?), I posted an example program that lets you report on the contents of a SAS information map. Using my example, you can see the data items, filters, and folder structure within a given information map. Last week a reader posted [...]

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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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