Key Happenings at support.sas.com - Sharing Updates and advances in SAS Online Support

We launched another forum on Friday afternoon! The Web Report Studio forum was created to establish a community of users that can share information, questions, and ideas about SAS Web Report Studio. While watching the discussions in our existing forums, I noticed that Web Report Studio questions were being asked in many of our forums. When the Web Report Studio forum launched, I searched for some of the more active posts and moved them to the new forum. If you haven't visited it yet, take a look. The forum already contains some nice discussions.

If you are a Web Report Studio user, you may also be interested in some of these resources:

• RSS feed for the forum


• Documentation page for Web Report Studio


• Papers that focus on Web Report Studio


• Samples that are valid for use with Web Report Studio

As always, we hope that you will use this forum to share experiences, post questions and suggestions, offer solutions, and interact with other SAS customers. Remember that you can follow the conversation in e-mail by setting a watch or in an RSS feed by subscribing to items that interest you. Instructions for both of these tasks are provided in Watching a forum.

We launched a new discussion forum at the end of August. The SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics forum provides a place to discuss the visual representation of data, to share your questions, suggestions, experiences, and pains regarding graphics. Join the discussion about SAS graphics.

We all love to see our data represented in fancy graphs and we love the fact that these cool visual displays can get so much attention for our data. I bet that almost every report you generate includes at least one graphic. And, I bet that you are always looking for ways to pump up the visual elements included in your reports. SAS/GRAPH software and ODS Graphics can help you in that effort. Review the list of resources below.

• SAS/GRAPH and ODS Graphics forum


• SAS/GRAPH samples gallery


• Data Visualization focus area


• Getting Started with ODS Statistical Graphics in SAS 9.2 paper


• SAS/GRAPH product page

Update, Nov 6:
This ondemand Webinar presented by Bob Rodriguez is a companion to the Getting Started with ODS Statistical Graphics paper referenced above. Watch the Webinar now.
[end update]

Here's one example that you can find in the samples gallery. Enjoy!

The following graph was produced using PROC SGRENDER. It is a Monthly Stock Price and Volume Graph [View the code in a new window]

We're on a roll with discussion forums. We launched yet another customer-requested forum this week; it focuses on data mining and text mining. Mining is all about digging through vast amounts of data to find trends that enable creating predictive and descriptive models. The SAS Data Mining and Text Mining forum will be most helpful to those who have SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Text Miner, and SAS Credit Scoring. However, you don't have to have these products to explore large data sets. Note: If you are unfamiliar with the data and text mining offerings from SAS, review the material provided in the Products & Solutions section of the SAS Web site.

As always, we hope that you will use this forum to share experiences, post questions and suggestions, offer solutions, and interact with other SAS data miners. Remember that you can follow the conversation in e-mail by setting a watch or in an RSS feed by subscribing to items that interest you. Instructions for both of these tasks are provided in Watching a forum.

Social media and community experts write tomes full of advice for how to foster conversations with and between your customers. The best advice is "be where they are." In other words, have the conversation in a place where your audience already hangs out. Sometimes that means participating in a community where your customers are already engaged. Sometimes that means creating an environment for them where they can share ideas and problem solutions. And in many cases, it means doing both.

We created forums on support.sas.com because we know that many customers visit the site to learn about SAS or to solve problems with their applications. We started with five forums that addressed hot topics at the time. Since then, you have requested forum topics and we've done our best to launch them. We also launched forums that we thought would address topics on the horizon. (See the graph at the end of this post for a glimpse of forum usage in March and April.)

Forums that are arriving

At your suggestion, we launched a general SAS Procedures forum in February 2008. This forum has been very active; generating 900+ threads in just under a year. We took a look at what was posted and decided to split this forum into two. The new forum, SAS Statistical Procedures was launched at the beginning of April 2009. It focuses on questions, experiences, and best practices for using SAS statistical procedures. We hope that the new forum enables you to use your forum time wisely and to target your posts to the right audience.

Because the existing procedures forum contained many posts that focused on the statistical procs, we moved 13 posts into the new forum to get it started. One of the great new posts comes from a SAS user plf515. He offers four quick steps for writing a good post, which in turn gets you a better answer. These guidelines apply for all posts, so take a look at How to ask a statistics question.

In addition to the SAS Statistical Procedures forum, we also launched the SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio forum. Hutch@sas says that the forum is "designed to serve users of SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio (formerly known as Stat Studio). We hope you will use this forum to interact with other users, posing questions and contributing your opinions about programming features and best programming practices." His two introductory posts provide some overview information about SAS/IML and SAS/IML Studio. These are great posts to read even if you don't use the IML language to perform advanced analytics.

You can read the forums by visiting support.sas.com/forums, you can subscribe to any or all forums via RSS (look for the orange icon on the page), or you can set a watch that will deliver forum content to you via e-mail.

To set a watch, you must first login to the site. To watch a forum or thread, navigate to the appropriate forum page. The list of items will contain either Watch Forum or Watch this Thread. Select the link.

You can create customized watch settings, such as the frequency with which you receive email. To customize your settings:

1. Make sure that you are logged on to support.sas.com.
   
2. Select Your Control Panel from the list at the top right of the forums page.
   
3. Select Your Watches from the Your Control Panel box.
   
4. Select the settings that fit best with your reading and work habits.
   
5. Select Update.
   

You must create a forum ID before you can post. You will be promoted to create this ID. It is the name that appears next to your post. You can decide how much to reveal about yourself in this name. All SAS posters have names that end in @sas. SAS employees posting for JMP, have names that end with @jmp.

Updated April 23:
Notify me when there is a response to my post
If you find that watching your posts is taking more time than you want to spend with forums, this tip is for you.

1. Make sure that you are logged on to support.sas.com.


2. Select Your Control Panel from the list at the top right of the forums page.


3. Select Your Watches from the Your Control Panel box.


4. Select Yes for the first question and maybe the second:
   
   Always watch threads I create
   Always watch thread I reply to

When you turn on this setting, answers to your questions will appear in your email inbox on the schedule you specifiy.

User discussion forums are a great way to find answers to your problems. I've searched forums for help with updating operating systems, fixing the washing machine, and selecting new plumbing fixtures. In all cases, the forums have been helpful and I never posted a single question. I just looked at the other questions, comments and opinions. I found most of these resources using search tools.

I look at the SAS discussion forums daily. Judging by the number of views for some of the posts, it looks like a lot of you are just looking for answers and opinions too. You can do that by scanning the posts on a regular basis, which is what I do, but I'm just looking to make sure that the forums are moving along nicely. Scanning the forums is not an effective way to locate more targeted information. Searching is what you want. Keep reading for hints on how to search the discussion forums for just the right piece of information.

New! Forum content is included in the site search
Starting in early March, we included the content of the discussion forums in the overall site search. This enables you to use the content of the discussion forums to help you solve problems without specifically visiting the forums. Just issue your search from the search box at the top of every page. You can easily recognize a forum post in your search results. Each forum result is preceded by SAS Discussion Forums: as shown in the image below.

Read these posts for more searching tips

Using the extending search
The discussion forums have their own search feature. You can search all of the forums from the entry page (support.sas.com/forums) or you can click to the forum most likely to contain your answer and search that forum using the search box on the right. But let me introduce you to the extended search.

You can access the extended search by selecting the Search link next to the search box on any page. The extended search page displays as shown below.


Just use the entry fields and selection lists to search all or some of the forums, look for posts from your favorite poster, or search posts within a certain date range. If you frequent the forums, you'll want to give this a try. You may also want to set watches so that updates are delivered to you.

Do you have a tip for how to use the discussion forums to learn more?

Another new forum has launched at support.sas.com/forums. The latest forum from SAS focuses on JMP software. Visit the forum and be among the first to post an idea, question, suggestion, or response. Arati Bechtel says in the JMP blog, "Inquiries and comments on all topics related to JMP are appropriate, including design of experiments, quality, data visualization, genomics and JMP integration with SAS."

You can keep up with the discussion by subscribing to the RSS feed or setting a watch that sends you an e-mail on a regular schedule that you choose.

Poll: Take a second to vote in the new poll. Let us know if you have ever posted to a discussion forum. We want to know how many SAS customers are willing to participate in discussion forums by posting questions or responses.

We have launched a new discussion forum at support.sas.com/forums. This forum focuses on using SAS products with accessibility features or with assistive technologies. Lisa Pappas, accessibility analyst at SAS, says "We invite you to join the conversation, posting your questions and solutions." This forum is monitored by SAS staff who test our products for accessibility and with assistive technologies such as JAWS screen reader and ZoomText screen magnifier.

Remeber that you can read the forums by visiting support.sas.com/forums, you can subscribe to any or all forums via RSS (look for the orange icon on the page), or you can set a watch that will deliver forum content to you via e-mail.

To set a watch, you must first login to the site. To watch a forum or thread, navigate to the appropriate forum page. The list of items will contain either Watch Forum or Watch this Thread. Select the link.

You can create customized watch settings, such as the frequency with which you receive email. To customize your settings:

1. Make sure that you are logged on to support.sas.com.
   
2. Select Your Control Panel from the list at the top right of the forums page.
   
3. Select Your Watches from the Your Control Panel box.
   
4. Select the settings that fit best with your reading and work habits.
   
5. Select Update.
   

Update: Take a sec to vote in the new poll at the right and let us know if you have ever posted to a discussion forum. We want to know if forums are a communication method that you are willing to participate in.

Whew! I've been speeding around information stops all over the Web. That's quite a workout. As alluded to in my last post, you can find really useful information in some unlikely places. Given that I challenged you to broaden your Internet stops, I've been trying to do the same. Because time is limited, accepting that challenge for myself meant that I ignored my usual stomping grounds. Feeling traitorous, I returned to them this morning and right away found a gem to share with you. I found this gem on my way through the SAS discussion forums.

Cynthia@sas responds to a poster in the SAS Procedures forum who asked "Is there a way to count the frequency of strings within a character variable?" Cynthia provides a short SAS program that performs a frequency count of the words in the first chapter of Melville's Moby Dick. In her post, she writes:

Interestingly enough, after you eliminate all the articles and prepositions and pronouns, the most frequently used word in the first chapter of Moby Dick is 'sea' (13 times) followed by 'water' (8 times). The words 'ship', 'soul', 'man' and 'whale' each occur 3 times. Anyway, the relevant part of that program is shown below -- I had to get rid of a stray '?' in the chapter, which is why the compress is in the code. Also, I turned everything to lower case, so 'The' and 'the' would get counted the same when I did a frequency on the WORD variable.

See the post to get the code. Anybody want to count the words in the speeches given at the two political conventions?

Dr. Goodnight and SAS have a long-standing commitment to education. If you have been following SAS in the news, you know that Dr. Goodnight has spoken at educational summits around the world. You also know that SAS has partnered with universities to establish new programs in statistics and data analysis. And, it should come as no surprise that SAS is highly involved in bringing education solutions to school systems around the country. For more information about SAS' involvement with education, visit www.sas.com/education.

SAS Education Practice has established a collection of discussion forums for those who teach with SAS Curriculum Pathways or who access SAS for class work using SAS OnDemand for Academics. If you are interested in either SAS Curriculum Pathways or SAS OnDemand for Academics, you may want to keep a watch on these forums.

The collection of forums is available under the SAS Education Practice heading on the Discussion Forums listing page.

I am happy to announce two new SAS Discussion Forums available on support.sas.com. You have been asking for forums that address basic functionality and more general topics. We hope these new forums address your requests:

• SAS Macro Facility and Other Language Elements
  This forum is open to all SAS software users with general programming questions or ideas, using language elements such as the Macro facility, DATA step, date/time formats, etc.



• SAS Procedures
  This forum is open to all SAS software users to find and offer help on the most frequently used SAS procedures, such as FORMAT, FREQ, MEANS, SQL, etc.

Tips, Tricks, and Hints
Each forum is dedicated to a specific topic. This makes it easier for you to locate posts concerning your burning issue. It also allows people to watch topics in which they are interested without having to plow through content that isn't relevant to their daily activites.

You can read posts without logging in. To post, you will have to login using your SAS Web profile userid and password. The first time that you post, you will have to create a Forum ID (screen name). This ID protects your e-mail address from spamming. You can reveal as much or as little about yourself as you would like in your screen name.

You can search all of the forums using the search box just above the category listing on the main page. An advanced search is available when you select Search at the beginning of the search field. (Note that the forums posts are not part of the overall site search that is available at the top of every page on the site.)

You can receive notification via e-mail. To set up a watch on a forum:

1. Login


2. Go to the forum that you want to watch


3. Select Watch Forum from the list of options above the message listing.

To customize your watch settings:

1. Login


2. Select Your Control Panel from the options in the upper right corner.


3. Select Your Watches from the control panel box.


4. Modify settings and watches as appropriate.
   I have selected to receive my watch e-mail as a digest once a day.

Forum notification is also available via RSS feeds. If you use RSS, you know what to do. Look for the little orange square.