Jedi SAS Tricks: FUNC(y) Formats

Mark Jordan
Mark Jordan|May 10, 2012

In the previous episode, we built our own custom SAS function – a masterful trick indeed. Gordon Keener, a developer here at SAS, responded exuberantly “You think that’s cool? – try THIS!” and proceeded to demonstrate prodigious powers with the SAS by using a custom function in a custom informat [...]

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Jedi SAS Tricks – Roll Your Own Function

Mark Jordan
Mark Jordan|May 3, 2012

A SAS user (who lives in the the US) emailed me a question about SAS functions. He was reading UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) datetime values from server logs, and to make future calculations and comparisons easier, he wanted to transform the value to local datetime.  The INTNX() function worked great, but [...]

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Debug SAS problems; don't repair drywall

Susan Farmer
Susan Farmer|April 19, 2012

Several years ago, my husband and I were remodeling our first house together.  We decided we wanted to have cable television upstairs.  Being young, foolish and lacking in disposable income, we decided to do it ourselves.  My husband said he would run the cable through the attic and drop it [...]

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Syntactic sugar - 6 SAS essentials

Charu Shankar
Charu Shankar|April 12, 2012

The 25 boys I teach on Sundays loved these cupcakes I baked for them for Easter… the sugared peeps had them completely satisfied. I love my tea or coffee laced with sugar. I think you‘d all agree that it is always more pleasant to meet a nice customer service person [...]

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Jedi SAS Tricks: These aren't the droids... Episode 1

Mark Jordan
Mark Jordan|January 13, 2012

How the power of the Force makes ridding yourself of problematic characters so much easier! I recently was invited to become an alternate instructor for Ron Cody’s SAS Business Knowledge Series class, “SAS Functions by Example”, and had the privilege of taking the class as a student under Ron’s tutelage. [...]

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Jedi SAS Tricks: Building a Name Suffix variable list

Mark Jordan
Mark Jordan|November 18, 2011

If you’ve taken one of my SAS classes you may recall “Mark’s 3 rules of programming”, the first of which is “Lazy programmers are GOOD programmers.”  One of the things I love about best about SAS programming is the plethora of functions and shortcuts built into the language, all designed [...]

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Weekday Morning Quick-trick: How to Score from PROC VARCLUS

Catherine Truxillo
Catherine Truxillo|December 2, 2010

Have you used multivariate procedures in SAS and wanted to save out scores? Some procedures, such as FACTOR, CANDISC, CANCORR, PRINCOMP, and others have an OUT= option to save scores to the input data set. However, to score a new data set, or to perform scoring with multivariate procedures that [...]

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How SAS engines can read a range of data in Excel

Charu Shankar
Charu Shankar|November 29, 2010

Japan has a superfast train called the Shinkansen. The first I heard of it was when my sister visited Japan on a scholarship. Engine-awestruck, we wanted a ride, but weren’t able to get to Japan. Nor, did we know the language. (With over 5000 kanjis, it took my sister 3 [...]

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Jedi SAS Tricks: Custom Bookmarks

Mark Jordan
Mark Jordan|November 19, 2010

I was building a nice little PDF report the other day.  I love the way ODS PDF replicates the SAS Results window navigation structure as PDF bookmarks, but… I’d much rather write the text for the bookmarks myself.  So, I decided to "use the SAS" and make ODS do my [...]

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Why Can't SAS Read My CSV file?

Mike Kalt
Mike Kalt|November 19, 2010

Many SAS users receive data in the form of CSV (Comma Separated Value) files, and need to convert them to SAS data sets. A typical record in a CSV file might look like this: Jeter,Derek,1995,,234,”22,600,000” Note the following about the record above: There is no data for the fourth field, [...]

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