SG Procedures and GTL provide you with a large set of plot statements, such as BarChart, ScatterPlot, BoxPlot and more. You can use them for the intended purpose, and all is well and good. However, the real fun starts when you leverage a plot to do something that was not
Here at SAS, we've come a long way with how we deal with blog spam on blogs.sas.com. Last year at this time, I was sifting through dozens of spam messages per day in order to salvage the one or two genuine comments that originate from real readers. I was just
Dear Rick, I am trying to create a numerical matrix with 100,000 rows and columns in PROC IML. I get the following error: (execution) Unable to allocate sufficient memory. Can IML allocate a matrix of this size? What is wrong? Several times a month I see a variation of this
Often, the topic of an article is motivated by a question from a user. A satisfactory resolution of the situation is usually a good indication of a topic that may be of interest to other users. On such question was posed to me by a user this weekend. He wanted to display fit
In writing the second edition of SAS Programming in the Pharmaceutical Industry, I knew that I wanted to replace the device-driven SAS/GRAPH figures with the new ODS template-driven graphics procedures. The latest developments in SAS graphics involve the template-driven procedures and tools found in SAS ODS graphics (i.e., ODS Graphics
When you run a program or task in SAS Enterprise Guide, the application wraps your job in an "ODS sandwich", the colloquial term we use for the ODS statements necessary to create output that can be viewed in your project. That's convenient for exploring and refining your program, but at
When you hear of a Scatter Plot or a Series Plot, you have a picture in your mind what we are talking about. But one of the plot statements available in GTL, and soon with SGPLOT, is the BLOCK plot. I am sure this leaves many users scratching their heads, wondering
I enjoy reading the Graphically Speaking blog because it teaches me a lot about ODS statistical graphics, especially features of the SGPLOT procedure and the Graph Template Language (GTL). Yesterday Sanjay blogged about how to construct a stacked bar chart of percentages so that each bar represents 100%. His chart
This week's SAS tip is from superstar author Ron Cody and his very popular book SAS Statistics by Example. Ron has been using SAS (and writing about SAS) for a long time. And he communicates his vast expertise in a friendly, easy-to-understand manner. If you've used any of Ron's books, I'm sure you'll agree. The following
When I visualize three-dimensional data, I prefer to use interactive graphics. For example, I often use the rotating plot in SAS/IML Studio (shown at the left) to create a three-dimensional scatter plot. The interactive plot enables me to rotate the cloud of points and to use a pointer to select
Often we need to plot multiple response variables on Y axes by a common variable on X axis. When the response variables are very different in magnitudes or format, we prefer to plot the variables on separate Y (Left) and Y2 (Right) axes. Here is some sample data with three response
My last blog post described three ways to add a smoothing spline to a scatter plot in SAS. I ended the post with a cautionary note: From a statistical point of view, the smoothing spline is less than ideal because the smoothing parameter must be chosen manually by the user.
Like many SAS programmers, I use the Statistical Graphics (SG) procedures to graph my data in SAS. To me, the SGPLOT and SGRENDER procedures are powerful, easy to use, and produce fabulous ODS graphics. I was therefore surprised when a SAS customer told me that he continues to use the
Browsing graphs on the web, this graph caught my eye: The Arctic Sea Ice Volume Graph. My interest is not so much in the debate on Climate Change or Global Warming. To me, this graph has some interesting features that can help show the benefits of plot layering to
One of the most popular graph amongst clinical and pharmaceutical users is the Survival Plot as created from the LIFETEST Procedure. This is one graph that users most often want to customize. See Creating and Customizing the Kaplan-Meier Survival Plot in PROC LIFETEST - Warren F. Kuhfeld and Ying So, SAS Institute
Need to read or update a ZIP file within your SAS program? In SAS 9.4, you can use the FILENAME ZIP access method to do the job. Explanation and examples here!
Users have often expressed the need for more marker symbols. ODS Graphics supports over 30 scalable marker symbols, both filled and empty. As mentioned in an earlier article, with SAS 9.4, filled markers can now have outlines and fills, and can also have special effects. Also with SAS 9.4, now you
A large variety of graphs fall in the category of what I call a "Single-Cell" graph. This type of graph consists of a single data region along with titles, footnotes, legends and other ancillary objects. Legends and text entries can be included in the data area. The data itself is displayed
In 2013 I published 110 blog posts. Some of these articles were more popular than others, often because they were linked to from a SAS newsletter such as the SAS Statistics and Operations Research News. In no particular order, here are some of my most popular posts from 2013, organized
Ron Cody starts things off right with our first SAS tip of 2014. If you resolve to become a better statistical programmer this year, Ron's book SAS Statistics by Example is a great place to start. After you take a look at this week's free excerpt from the book, head over to Ron's author page. You'll
Recently a user new to GTL and SG procedures asked how to create a Bland-Altman graph on the SAS Communities site. He included an image of the resulting graph to indicate what he wanted, I described to him how that graph can be created, but since he is new to the art
The SAS 9.4 Maintenance 1 release is now shipping to users. This is great news for GTL and SG procedures users as this release includes some useful new features. Some of these are in direct response to your requests, and others are enhancements that we think you will come to like.
Often we have situations where the category values on the graph have long character strings. This is often the case when graphing survey responses to questions. The questions may be sentences, sometimes moderately long. With SAS 9.4, GTL and SG now support the ability to display tick values split over
Creating a Bar Chart with a table of statistical data aligned with the bars is a popular topic. With SAS 9.4, creating such graphs gets easier with the new AXISTABLE statement in GTL and SG procedures. But some use cases can flummox the latest gizmos. Such is the case I ran into recently. Here
Last week I covered some of the interesting graph-related papers presented at WUSS. There were quite a few, so I broke up the report into two parts. Here is the second installment. In the paper Creating Graphical Patient Profiles using SAS by William Garner of Gilead Sciences, the author describes how to create
It is always a pleasure to attend SAS user conferences, regional conferences and in-house events. In addition to presenting papers, seminars and super demos to the attendees myself, my favorite activity is to attend presentations by users that include graphical data visualization. These include using SG procedures, GTL, Designer or SAS/GRAPH. This year
In recent conversations with many SAS users at NESUG, SESUG and WUSS, a pattern emerges on the question of creating graphs with SAS or R. Many SAS users are aware of the new graph features in SAS that create high quality graphs with minimum fuss. But, many have not actually used
In reference to a previous article on Violin Plots, a reader asked about creating comparative mirrored histograms to compare propensity scores. While I had my own understanding of "Mirrored Histograms", I also looked this up on the web. Google showed many cases of two histograms back to back, either horizontally or vertically.
I decided this year to get serious about my running. I started recording my distance for every run. I made a SAS data set and generated simple reports. After a few weeks, I set a goal of averaging one marathon a week (3.8 miles per day, 26.2 miles per week,
Working at SAS, I consider myself fortunate to have the best employee benefits in the industry. That is one of the factors placing SAS as one of the best companies to work for worldwide, and often THE best company to work for in USA. Given that, I was curious to know the kind
