Are you a SAS Enterprise Guide user? If so, you are in luck. SAS Press author Neil Constable provides the inspiration for this week's SAS Author's tip. And this book is more than just a pretty face (the cover photographs very nicely). You'll find rich content from beginning to end.

The following excerpt is from SAS Press author Neil Constable's book SAS Programming for Enterprise Guide Users, Second Edition. Copyright © 2010, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, North Carolina, USA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (please note that results may vary depending on your version of SAS software)

Getting Ready to Face the World

Would you like the projects you develop to be usable anywhere in the world? Even if your company does not yet have offices in other countries, it could happen. Why not get ready for it now?

A whole series of formats and functions available in SAS Enterprise Guide, prefixed with
the letters “NL,” are part of the SAS National Language Support system.

It is possible to use some of the formats in a restrictive way by including country details
in the name of the format. However, this approach is cumbersome, and converting the
project for use in another country would take a huge effort.

For example, you could format your currency using DOLLAR12.2 or, more properly in
recent versions of SAS, using NLMNLUSD12.2 (NL = National Language, MN =
Money, L = Local Currency Symbol, USD = United States Dollars). If you then wanted
to work on some data from the British office, or let the British office use your SAS
Enterprise Guide project, then you would have to go through every currency format and
change it to NLMNLGBP12.2.

The good news is that you can create your projects in such a way that you need to make
only one change for all the currency, dates, and times to be displayed in the preferred
format of a selected country, and for the correct language to be used throughout. You just
need to tell SAS Enterprise Guide where you are and use the general versions of the
National Language formats.

For additional freebies, view a free chapter from Neil's book as well as his on-demand Webinar on SAS Enteprise Guide.