I’m beginning to think that 2012 is the year of the customer. We’ve seen a huge increase in customer experience initiatives coming out of the financial services and insurance industry this year. As we’re working with these companies to help them through this journey, you can almost forget that you
Update 24Nov2015: The methods in this post no longer work for Twitter, as Twitter has discontinued support for its "share count" API that was used within the Twitter share buttons. But the Facebook method still works, and I've described a method for counting LinkedIn shares on another post. As of
Questions (or search strings) lead people to my blog or my email box on a daily basis and many of these are related to what SAS Stored Processes can or cannot do. Can a SAS Stored Process query an RDBMS? Can a SAS Stored Process create a data table? Could
Often we want to display data as a bar chart where a few observations have large values compared to the rest. Comparison between the smaller values becomes hard as the small bars are squeezed by the tall bars. Here is an example data, and a bar chart showing the data. The large values
I recently gave a talk to a group of engineering students at Duke University, located just down the road from our headquarters in North Carolina. A couple of days later, one of the students sent me an email asking a very good question: which skills should I build up to
Many SAS customers are quickly adopting 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows, and they are pleased-as-punch when they find a 64-bit version of SAS to run on it. They waste no time in deploying the new version, only to find that a few things don't work quite the same as they
Hi, I'm Andrea Wainwright-Zimmerman. I'm doing two papers at SAS Global Forum 2012: one in Reporting and Information Visualization and one in Coder's Corner. In Coder's Corner, I've got a simple trick using a DATA Step and a PROC SORT to achieve the same thing as a PROC SORT NODUPKEY, but I let
I’m a SAS user in the Pharmaceutical industry. I switched to the Pharmaceutical industry (from Marketing Research) four years ago and had a lot to learn! I started my new endeavor by purchasing some excellent SAS books, joining my local SAS user group, attending conferences (Michigan SAS User Group, PharmaSUG,
Last week I discussed how to fit a Poisson distribution to data. The technique, which involves using the GENMOD procedure, produces a table of some goodness-of-fit statistics, but I find it useful to also produce a graph that indicates the goodness of fit. For continuous distributions, the quantile-quantile (Q-Q) plot
The INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research kicks off April 15 in Huntington Beach, CA. I had a chance to preview a presentation by Glenn Bailey, Sr. Director of Operations Research at Manheim (the $3B wholesaler auto auctioneer). Glenn's talk is on "The Need for Speed: Responsive Predictive Analytics,"
As a Master Chief in US Navy submarines, one of my favorite sayings was “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment.” I've always had difficulty solidly learning new programming techniques in a traditional classroom. The new techniques and theories I've learned don’t really take root until I've used them to solve
Do you want your report to look good on the web, or to look good when you print it? Pick one. Before the SAS Report file format, that was the choice that you faced. HTML is perfect for the web browser. It's easy to scroll through tables, to apply an
One great element of SAS’ Analytics2011 conference (not a SAS Users Group conference, but a great place for SAS users to find information about using SAS) is how it gives students a platform to showcase their work in analytics. Every year, hundreds of posters are submitted outlining innovative applications and research
In my Friday series about innovation, I've decided to include some personal stories of unusual and unique uses of SAS. Once a month or so, I'll swap out the Post-it Notes for a profile of someone who has used SAS in an innovative way to solve a problem or, like
Halloween is around the corner and children everywhere will wear masks throughout their neighborhoods for a night of trick-or-treating fun and, likely, too much candy. A masking has also occurred in education policy with the No Child Left Behind Act, sans the candy at the end of the night. That
Like millions of other Americans, I recently was asked to make a decision of tremendous importance to my household -- a decision that would affect the welfare of everyone in my family. That decision, of course, was whether to continue to receive Netflix movies by mail, or opt for the
The SAS office in New York City has one of the best views in the city. Sitting on the 47th floor of a skyscraper on 7th Avenue, the Executive Briefing Room overlooks Central Park and it has a highly distracting view – especially on such a nice sunny day. What
Last week I talked about how I volunteered to serve as a judge for a middle-school science fair. As I expected, I enjoyed the experience quite a bit, and I hope the students got something positive from me as well. I evaluated several really impressive projects at the 7th grade
I am thankful to be a statistical programmer. When I wake up in the morning, I am eager to start my day. I love statistics, programming, and working at SAS, and I write my blog to share that joy. This a Golden Age for statistical programmers because theoretical ideas and
It has been a blast to teach my Statistical Programming class this Fall. I got to use my book, Statistical Programming in SAS! This book evolved over many years in response to the development of a class proposed in response to an external program review that noted a gap in
Though this is a busy time of year for SAS’ Education Division with the second A2010 Analytics Conference in Copenhagen and the thirteenth M2010 Data Mining Conference both just recently completed, I had the opportunity to catch up with Bob Lucas, PhD, who oversees statistical training at SAS. Anne: Bob,
Organizations have massive amounts of data at their disposal, yet they often fail to utilize it in any meaningful way. But analytics is enabling many firms to aggressively use their data in key business processes with impressive results. You have more information at hand about your business than ever before,
I am not a statistician, but I love statistics. Statistics are facts, and when used for good, they are an important ingredient in sound decision making about almost any issue, whether it's about government policy or your personal behavior. The use of statistics has gone way beyond counting things, computing
Question: Is there a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide? Answer: SAS Enterprise Guide is a 32-bit application, even with its most recent release. As such, it is still completely supported on any 64-bit Windows machine, but it runs in the 32-bit subsystem (also known as WoW64 – short for
I spent last week in the UK for the SAS Professionals Convention. It was my first time visiting the UK. If my experience is any indication, then the area (just outside of London) is constantly warm and very bright. However, I did visit very near the summer solstice and I'm
Contributed by Susan Slaughter, Author, The Little SAS Book series Answer: A lot. Looking at The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2, I am struck by how similar it looks to the previous edition. Updating this book for EG4.2 was not a matter of simply adding a few new
One of the events I look forward to every year is the unveiling of a year’s worth of SAS R&D’s magic. It occurs during the SAS Global Forum Technology Connection. Today’s show was all we could have hoped it would be! We heard from some SAS software, technology and statistics
The SAS Talks series is a big hit, and now we've got a landing page where you can find previously recorded talks, plus information about upcoming talks. You can learn about SAS programming with SAS Enterprise Guide, ODS statistical graphics, fancy multi-sheet output for Microsoft Excel from SAS, and more!
While at SAS, I hope to get the opportunity to talk with all of the SAS icons. I’ve had the privilege to meet many. Before the SAS winter break, I had the privilege to talk with another: Michael Raithel. At SAS® Global Forum 2010, Raithel will be presenting the Tuesday
Contributed by Michele Burlew, president of Episystems Inc. and SAS Publishing author What a great way to end 2009 by having both Combining and Modifying SAS Data Sets: Examples, Second Edition (CMDS) and Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond (ODS) in print! Each is a hefty stocking stuffer for
