The SAS Dummy - A SAS blog for the rest of us.

If you're accustomed to using "shell" commands from within your SAS programs (using the X command or SYSTASK statement, for example), you'll find that those statements won't work when you run your program from within SAS Enterprise Guide. When you try them, you will probably see one of the following error messages:

ERROR: Shell escape is not valid in this SAS session.
ERROR: Insufficient authorization to access SYSTASK COMMAND.

Out of the box, when SAS is configured for use by a client application like SAS Enterprise Guide, the shell command access is disabled through use of the -NOXCMD system option. Why? Well, in a distributed computing environment, your system administrators probably do not want SAS Enterprise Guide users to have full access to the shell environment on the host server.

If your SAS workspace is on a central server, you have just a couple of options:

1. Use a custom task to run system commands on your local Windows machine, if that's what you need to do.
   
2. Petition your system administrator to specify -ALLOWXCMD on the central workspace server. Good luck!

This same configuration applies even when using SAS Enterprise Guide with the SAS that's installed on your very own desktop. You might argue, "But it's my desktop machine! I should be able to run commands on my own machine." To which I would reply, "You're right!".

You can change the registered SAS command that SAS Enterprise Guide uses in order to remove the -NOXCMD startup option. But since this involves unseemly interaction with the Windows registry, you might prefer to use a tool that does this for you. I've placed such a tool here. (It's a ZIP file that contains a program and a ReadMe.txt file with instructions.)

This tool displays the currently registered SAS command and allows you to change it. In addition to allowing you to modify the SAS command startup options, you can use the tool to help synchronize the registered SAS command on a 64-bit Windows platform so that it can be used by a 32-bit process (such as SAS Enterprise Guide).

If you've read this blog before, then you already know about the ODS statistical graphics that are available in SAS 9.2. We've been talking about this innovation at SAS for years.

Now it's time to spread the news. Do your colleagues a favor: forward this post to them, or at least the link to this recorded web talk by Bob Rodriguez. It's free, it's informative, and it could change the way you use SAS.

I've just returned from the Los Angeles Basin SAS Users Group (LABSUG), where I both presented a talk and learned from others. (The meeting was in Pasadena, but I did get a chance to tour the area, as you can see from my picture.)

The title of my talk was "Upping your SAS Game with SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise Guide". Here's the description:

Join me on a journey of how I use new and recent features in SAS to solve problems that are of high interest in today's Web 2.0 world. Specifically, I'll show how I've used SAS to analyze my history with a certain online movie rental service, and also how I can use SAS to keep tabs on my Facebook friends. We'll see how all of this can be put together within SAS Enterprise Guide, mixing out-of-the-box tasks with SAS programming techniques to create repeatable processes. We'll also save some time at the end for sneak peak at what's coming in the next release of SAS Enterprise Guide – SAS programmers will not want to miss this!

The main message of my presentation is this: there is a boatload of new features/functions/procs in SAS 9.2, and even in SAS 9.1.3, that are worth looking at and trying out. You can use these features to get real work done and modernize your SAS programs to take advantage of the latest stuff. SAS Enterprise Guide helps you along because it "puts you on the path" to the new stuff (such as ODS Graphics) with some of the point-and-click interfaces, but even if you work exclusively in SAS programs, you should take the time to learn about some of the new syntax available to you.

I also provided a preview of our next release of SAS Enterprise Guide; there was considerable jaw-dropping and drooling going on. You'll see much more of this at SAS Global Forum 2010.

If you want to peek at the slides from my LA presentation, here they are.

Yesterday I attended a virtual talk by Bob Rodriguez on his famous topic: ODS Statistical Graphics in SAS 9.2. You can learn lots of details by reading his paper. Bob's paper shows examples of the graphs you can get, how to control their appearance, and what SAS syntax to use.

The question came up: can I access these great new statistical graphs in SAS Enterprise Guide? The answer is: Yes, of course. In fact, you'll get the new graphs automatically from most of the analytical tasks within SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. No programming necessary!

Here are the tasks that currently provide the new graphs:

Cluster Analysis	One-Way ANOVA
Correlations	Principal Components
Distribution Analysis	Proportional Hazards
Factor Analysis	t Test
Generalize Linear Models	Create Time Series Data
Life Tables	One-Way Frequencies
Linear Models	Summary Statistics
Linear Regression	Characterize Data
Logistic Regression	Forecast Studio tasks (using SAS Forecast Server)
Mixed Models	Capability (Histogram, etc.)

Of course, you can also use SAS Enterprise Guide to run your own SAS programs and access any of the new ODS Graphics, using the approach presented in Bob's paper.

I arrived at work this AM to see a link to this blog featured as part of the sasCommunity.org Tip of the Day.

If you clicked on that link and landed here, welcome! I hope it was worth the click. Please, make yourself at home and browse through the 2 years (wow!) worth of blog posts that I've collected here so far.

A customer posted on the discussion forum that, much his dismay, SAS Enterprise Guide sets the NOFMTERR option automatically when connecting to a SAS session.

The FMTERR|NOFMTERR option specifies whether SAS should report an error when you attempt to reference a data column that has a SAS format applied, but the format definition cannot be found.

SAS Enterprise Guide has always set NOFMTERR, even though it's not the default setting for the option in SAS. Why? Because if you attempt to open data that references a SAS format that SAS cannot find, not only will you be unable to open the data, but you'll get a pop-up message that says something like "Format VAL. cannot be found". Because many SAS Enterprise Guide users are new to SAS, and that message is confusing at best, we erred on the side of allowing you to open the data even without the format. This decision was made in the very early days of the product over 10 years ago, and we've had no suggestions to change it. Then again, we didn't really tell people we were doing it.

In SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 we made it easier to see exactly what's happening when SAS initializes. No more secrets! Here are the steps:

1. Select View->Server List
   
2. In the Server list, expand the server you are connecting to (ex: "SASApp" or "Local")
   
3. Right-click on the server name and select Properties.
   
4. Click on the Software tab.
   
5. Click on View Initialization Log.
   

You'll see a SAS log window that contains the same startup log that you might know from running SAS interactively (including the NEWS= content, if any!).

I'll tell you right now: one other system option that SAS Enterprise Guide submits is VALIDVARNAME=ANY, which makes it much easier to import those spreadsheet files with funny column names.

If you want to override these options at startup, that's easy to do by providing your own initialization statements. Check out this sasCommunity.org tip for instructions.

I found this excellent example of What Not To Do on graphjam.com.

I was inspired to see if I could recreate something similar in SAS. You see the result here. Yes, the PIE3D statement is ready to do your bidding. If that's what you really want.

Along with hundreds of SAS users, Alison (of sas.com fame) is attending the MidWest SAS User Group meeting. She recently "live-blogged" the keynote presentation from Suzanne Gordon, our CIO.

Suzanne does us proud every time. Check out what she had to say to the MWSUG attendees about her start at SAS and her career since. Also, Alison has been live-blogging MWSUG sessions with other SAS community notables, including Jon Weisz and Kirk Paul Lafler.