According to Berryhill, there are two very important things you can do to make the best of your time and those who look at your code later: Make sure your code is clear and correct. "To me, the main thing is correct. If the answers are wrong, it doesn't matter how you got there," he says.

Here are three of his tried-and-true tips:

1. "I like to use the %LET, particularly at the top of my code where variables are going to change," says Berryhill. He use a series of the %LET at the top of the program to remind him of changes he needs to make.
2. The NOBS option tells you how many observations you have in a dataset. According to Berryhill, the option is most useful when NOBS is 0. "If you try to do a PROC PRINT or a global dataset, you set that empty dataset, and Boom you're gone. (This only works for disk files, not views or tapes.)"
3. Try your luck. When he isn't on a tight deadline, Berryhill says that he likes to experiment with code just to see if it  works. Recently, he found that the double question mark will suppress expected errors in the input function. "I was surprised to find out that it is also supported in a statement."

Read 27 more of Berryhill's SAS tricks in his paper, "30 in 20 things you may not know about SAS."

Koketso Moeng says that Statistics South Africa has allowed its users to access internal sites from their smartphones for some time, but reading text heavy reports and tables on an iPhone can be frustrating. And even in the areas on the website where they were using visualization, the information still wasn't as accessible as they would have liked.

Choosing a platform

Moeng says the team had to carefully consider the level of security that would be offered. "We have a lot of very sensitive information that should not be released before it's time," he said.

Additionally, Statistics South Africa had to ensure that the platform integrated with its existing infrastructure.  "We have invested a lot of money in our SAS environment and our operating environment," Moeng said. "So whatever we bring into that environment must integrate - you don't want to have to reshuffle things just to bring an additional tool into your environment."

Finally, Moeng's team wanted to make sure their users were happy with the platform so they would use it. They conducted focus groups to test the mobile BI on several platforms. "We said, 'Play around with these tools and give us feedback. Which ones do you like? Why do you like them? and Which one is most appealing to you?'"

Pinch, swipe, tap

They decided to go with Roambi because of the easy interface and many of the end-users were already using the iPad and iPhone. Moeng says there are "two flavors" of Roambi: Roambi Analytics produces beautiful graphics and with Roambi Flow, you can embed those graphics. This gives the end-user an interactive document that gives context to the data visualization.

"Configuration is very easy," says Moeng. In a SAS Enterprise Business Intelligence environment, it takes only a matter of minutes to configure. (Roambi runs off TomCat and MySQL.) Roambi uses the URL from your SAS Web Report Studio environment to interact with SAS.

As you can imagine, Roambi is touch-enabled - pinch, swipe and tap to access and manipulate the reports. Moeng did his entire presentation using Roambi Flow on an iPad.

In Moeng's paper, "Extending SAS Reports to your iPhone," you can read more about publishing reports and giving access to your end-users. Also check out what SAS Visual Analytics can do on the mobile.

Each year, 8 million people visit the Alberta Parks. They're bird watchers. Hikers, bikers and canoers. They're searching for adventure or a romantic fire lit evening. Since 2002, Alberta Parks has been using a paper survey to learn about the experiences and expectations of those visitors.

According to Alberta Tourism, Parks and Recreation analyst Jared Prins, the structured data from the surveys is easy to analyze. But, what about all of that unstructured data - write-in comments like "Rangers need skimpier uniforms." The old way of doing this was to hand-type the comments into a spreadsheet and then convert that into a SAS data set for analysis.

This can be a long, painful process. Prins said manually coding the surveys would take him three weeks locked in his office so that he could concentrate only on the data. Now, the process is largely automated and takes just a few minutes. That is a significant time savings, but Prins says that's only part of it. Text mining gives Alberta Parks a deeper understanding of its data and provides consistency.

If you only wanted to know how many times a word appears in the data, a simple word count would do the trick. What happens when you run into homonyms or words that can have two meanings? The parsing and filter nodes process natural language. The text parsing node understands parts of speech so that it can distinguish between river bank and international bank. Look at this example:

"There was nowhere to park my car."

"This is a fantastic park to visit."

And the noise is further reduced by reducing words to their root form (stems, stemming and stemmed all become stem) and using Stop and Start lists. A Stop List can be set to  ignore words such as - the, and, is.

"At Alberta Parks, we're becoming more focused on discovering actionable intelligence from our text data," he said.  Text mining helps them do that. It also helps them get a deeper understanding of customer issues by making it possible to handle more open-ended questions.

Read Jared Prins' SAS Global Forum 2013 paper to learn more about how Alberta Parks is using SAS Text Miner. He also gives great ideas for setting it up for yourself. Read "Replace Manual Coding of Customer Survey Comments with Text Mining: A Story of Discovery with Text as Data in the Public Sector."

Orginally, Beaver and Scroggins wanted to use the SAS® Information Delivery Portal to provide financial information to the state representatives of Farm Bureau Insurance. But as they were building out the dashboard and reporting capabilities, they realized that it had broader uses for them.

Their seemed to be a separation between internal customers (e.g. documentation, lending, personal banking) and external customers (Farm Bureau Insurance agents and state representations). A step to reduce that sense of distance was to provide the dashboard and daily financial reports to all stakeholders.

Various departments are supported by the work that Beaver and Scroggins do, including the board of directors, lenders, documentation, underwriting and personal banking. The reports help these customers compare and contrast department against department, county against county, state against state, etc. “It gives them a better idea of what’s going on,” says Scroggins.

Beaver and Scroggins wrote “Using SAS® Enterprise BI for Integrated Bank Reporting” to show other SAS users how to create and present reports using SAS® Enterprise BI Server and the SAS® Information Delivery Portal.

In their paper, they cover the following reports:

• Financial balance sheet and income statement
• Variance reports with actual, budgeted and difference – by department and line item. The reports let the user to drill down to the general ledger entry.
• Daily and monthly new account volume
• New account volume by geographic area and type

The dashboard and reports are for anyone in the organization who is using BI applications – for instance, administrators and analysts may be very comfortable manipulating a cube, whereas business users and executives may only want an “easily digestible” piece that shows up every morning in an email.

“We are in a place now where things are siloed, but we’re moving toward using SAS as the reporting system for the entire organization,” says Scroggins. “So, that will be our one version of the truth.”

According to Scroggins, he and Beaver don’t deliver reports to Farm Bureau Insurance customers, but the reports may help the internal stakeholders serve the customers better. There are no metrics to verify that the reports and dashboards have improved the bank’s operation or performance - no money saved, no extra money earned – but perhaps this soft ROI is just as important.

Read Scroggins and Beaver’s paper, “Using SAS Enterprise BI for Integrated Bank Reporting.” You can find all of the 2013 SAS Global Forum papers here.

Think of the possibilities this can open for you. You can provide answers to questions that haven't even been asked for yet, resolve problems they didn't know exist. And, data visualization helps you translate your findings in a way that is easier to understand. You can even take a test drive - try it now!

Read these other blog posts for more great information about for using visual analytics:

Visual analytics will inspire more questions than we ever would have asked before
5 features SMBs want from data visualization
How to make data visualization more intuitive with auto charting
How to visualize before you model big data
Tell your story
Are your applications designed tactically or strategically?

Go ahead - watch the demo and then plug you data into SAS^® Visual Analytics. Then tell me what you learned during your test drive.

Join the community to:

• Discuss ideas.
• Ask questions.
• Seek peer assistance.
• Share areas and events of interest with others.

The new community is co-moderated by Julia Marshall, of USAID and Heather Edwards, Associated Press.

Take a minute to check this out: Everyone is welcome.

Building reusable and extensible code requires planning and discipline, but the benefits outweigh the efforts. Once the framework is in place and metadata is available for a project, results can be delivered rapidly with little effort. By defining and utilizing minimally acceptable inputs and results - even if a component isn't available - the other components can be delivered to provide immediate value. Code modularization not only helps reusability but chunks the logic into digestible pieces. Documenting and sharing knowledge about short, focused modules is far easier than doing it for thousands of lines of code in one chunk.

Read Four steps to developing reusable code and production processes. 

In this paper, Credit Scoring for SAS Enterprise Miner software is used to build credit scoring models for the retail credit industry. In the introduction, it discusses the benefits of performing credit scoring and the advantages of building credit scoring models in-house using SAS Enterprise Miner. The paper also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of three important model types: the scorecard, the decision tree and the neural network. Finally, it includes a case study where an application scoring model is built with SAS Enterprise Miner, beginning with reading the development sample, through classing and selecting characteristics, fitting a regression model, calculating score points, assessing scorecard quality (in comparison to a decision tree model built on the same sample) and going through a reject inference process to arrive at a model for scoring the new customer applicant population.

Efficiency is gained by completely automating the modeling process, but even more so by providing the analyst with a graphical user interface that structures, connects and documents the flow of activities that are carried out. If changes or variations need to be introduced, the overall process is already defined and doesn’t have to be started from scratch. (For example, if a similar analysis needs to be carried out on different data, for a different purpose and by a new analyst, the process is still easy to apply.) Process flows enable the organization to implement its traditional way of working but also to experiment with new approaches and compare the results. The environment is flexible and open to allow the analyst to interact with the data and models and bring in his or her domain expertise.

Review the process and the case study in this best practices paper: Building Credit Scorecards Using Credit Scoring for SAS^® Enterprise Miner^TM. Do you have other suggestions for papers on credit scoring for your fellow SAS users?

Your skills and expertise are a very meaningful part of the analysis process, but some of the tasks can be automated. For instance, instead of having to know exactly what to look for at any given moment, you can set up alerts to proactively identify, prioritize and provide information - all based on pattern identification and quantification of risk.

In this case study, the US government is using social network analysis software to answer questions that were unanswerable before or would have taken several analysts days, weeks or months:

• Can the occurrence of one event be linked to another, thereby establishing a pattern?
• Does a particular transaction or event exhibit any alarming characteristics? 
• Has some network collectively engaged in alarming transactions or activities? 
• Does an activity significantly deviate from normal, expected behavior? 
• Do changes in the frequency of communications indicate that an event is likely to occur? Should I be concerned about some recent activity, even though it seems harmless on its own?

"A manual process is most often implemented to retain versions and snapshots of data, programs and deliverables with varying degrees of success," writes Mengelbier writes in his SAS Global Forum 2012 paper. He says that there are many software solutions to provide version control and an audit trail - automatically.  In his paper, Mengelbier explains how SAS processses and tools can be integrated for use with Subversion (open source software) for "simple and quick implementations for a SAS analytics environment as well as advanced integration with formal compliance controls."

In addition to version control, Mengelbier says that many providers - including Subversion - provide add-ons such as electronic signatures and business controls.

Mengelbier's macro and templates can be used in any clinical study, but he says "it provides the greatest advantage for a set of clinical studies that have similar design and endpoints."

Download Mengelbier's paper to get more details. 

You asked for it, and you got it: On Friday, December 8, 2012, a "Keep me logged in" option was added to the Login windows on all SAS web sites. Select this option when you log in to stay logged in to the SAS web sites for seven days if you are active or up to five days when you are idle. And, your login will persist across browser sessions during the seven or five day period. (Great news for those who follow community activity via email.)

Let us know how this works out, and tell us about other improvements you’d like to see.

Normal business operations will be suspended for the US SAS  Technical Support Division and Customer Service Department beginning 8 p.m., Friday, Dec. 21.  A limited number of Technical Support consultants will be available Monday, Dec. 24 through Friday, Dec. 28, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (US).

Don't worry. During this time, critical problems will be handled as usual and in accordance with Technical Support policies.

SAS Technical Support consultants will monitor and respond to:

• Email requests sent via support@sas.com.
• Web form submissions from support.sas.com.
• Phone voice mail messages called in to the Cary office 919-677-8008.

On these days, critical issues will take priority over non-critical issues.

Normal business hours for the US SAS Technical Support Division and Customer Service Department will resume on Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2012 at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (US).

Offices outside the US will operate according to the country schedules and holiday policies. Contact your local SAS Office for hours or more information.

What to do before calling or emailing?

Try self help. You may find that the answer you're seeking has already been found and published. I know ... self help can seem overwhelming when you're looking at support.sas.com as a whole, so let me break it down for you a bit. Here are a few links to get you started:

• Go to Our Knowledge Base
• Engage Your On-site SAS Support Personnel
• Download Files and Hot Fixes
• Manage Your Accounts
• Get Assistance with License Issues
• Visit Communities.sas.com to Converse with SAS Users
• Subscribe to
  • TSNEWS-L for hot fix announcements and important news from Technical Support
  • e-Newsletters
  • RSS feeds, blogs, and listservs

One last thing to do before contacting SAS Technical Support.  Gather this information to speed resolution of your problem:

• Your site or customer number
• Product name
• SAS software release
• Operating system
• Description of your problem

These tips should help you even if you won't be on holiday!!

The 4th International SAS Analytics Conference (Analytics 2013) in Europe will be held June 19 and 20 in the heart of London at the Park Plaza.

Paper Presenters

We want to have a broad array of presenters with papers from across Europe and the US, and from many industries. Presenters can be SAS employees, partners and customers and non-SAS customers, but not our competitors. Paper topics can be SAS analytics solution implementations, general analytics issues or about analytics theory.  SAS will cover the travel and hotel expenditures for paper presenters (one person per paper).

Paper Proposals

Please submit your Analytics 2013 paper proposals to Myles Hannon no later than January 7.

Each paper proposal should include:

Speaker information

• Current job position - include company name and industry.
• Education.
• Links to books, articles and papers
• Areas of expertise.

Paper

• Analytics area.
• Paper topic.
• Industry.
• Draft paper title (if possible).
• Short abstract (2-3 lines, if possible).

Paper Approval

We will collect all proposals and review them.  If your paper proposal is accepted by the Analytics 2013 Program Committee, we will then need your paper title, abstract and your picture and profile.

Questions

View the Analytics 2013 website. If you have questions about the Analytics 2013 paper selection process or require any other guidance, then please contact Myles Hannon.

Huang's poster, A SAS Macro Application to Create Mock Tables in Statistical Analysis Plans for Phase I Clinical Studies, was displayed at PharmaSUG China in July. In the paper, Huang provides an example of the macro and the mock template. Huang says that he uses the macro %mock_table and the excel sheet template to save time. Creating tables using a word processor was very time consuming and inefficient.

"The macro and excel template method can be easily modified to create mock tables in other clinical studies with similar study objectives and endpoints," writes Huang.

Read his paper for examples of the mock  template and use of %mock_table.