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At SAS Global Forum last week, a customer approached me with a very specific request. The conversation went something like this: Customer: My client demands a bar chart that uses a bar for one response, and a symbol for other responses, all on the same chart. We know it's possible
I’ve never found a great user guide, not to say that one doesn’t exist. You should be able to schedule any type of executable/job like a batch file from using the Platform LSF client tools (packaged with the server tools). You can also use command line executables like bsub and
The data table creation date is sometimes necessary, say in the footnote of your stored process. Included below is a sample to retrieve this date from the file system. /*Open the dataset*/ %let dsid=%sysfunc(open(sashelp.shoes)); data _null_; /*grab the CRDTE function*/ ddate=%sysfunc(attrn(&dsid;,CRDTE )); /*Format in DDMONYY*/ call symput('ddate', put(ddate, dtdate9.)); run;
Are you a SAS programmer who does not yet use SAS Enterprise Guide? If so, what are you missing? That's the topic of my SAS Presents paper at SAS Global Forum: Find Out What You're Missing: Programming with SAS Enterprise Guide. From the introduction: More and more SAS programmers are
~ Contributed by Hope Squires ~ Daniel Schorr is one of my favorite NPR reporters. I just hope he doesn’t mind me announcing that in a blog. Schorr has some strong opinions about what blogging has done to the news industry. In a recent Q&A with The Sacramento Bee, he
It's only January, and SAS Global Forum 2008 isn't until March, but folks around here have already been preparing for months. For my part, I'm on the hook for two papers: one "invited" (submitted and accepted by the SAS Global Forum committee) and one as a "SAS Presents" (topics that
I was reading an article in Project Manager Today magazine (more interesting than it might sound) about 'Unknown Unknowns and Risk' and it made reference to Donald Rumsfeld's infamous comment about "we know there are some things we do not know". Actually, he was making sense in a garbled sort
Even if you don't use Microsoft Office 2007, you might have noticed more ".xlsx" files floating around lately. Perhaps you've been sent one or two that you can't open. XLSX is one of the new Microsoft Excel 2007 file formats. (Others include XLSB and XLSM.) Like many software applications, SAS
A reader from Bejing commented on a recent post with a question about data lengths and formats. While that wasn't really related to my post, I thought I'd attempt to answer in a new entry, here. The question is basically this: when I combine two data sets with a common-named
SAS tip-meister Phil Mason shares a veritable cornucopia of tips at the CMG 2007 conference. Check it out, and learn how a healthy diet of flexible DATE formats can keep your Perl expressions regular.
In his blog, Jared details the hoops one must jump through to convince SAS to run system shell commands (such as the X command and SYSTASK) from SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is the explanation: SAS Enterprise Guide is a client application, and SAS runs as a server application. When launched
"Cut him in half and count the number of rings?" Some folks on the discussion forum share a better method to calculate someone's age from SAS Enterprise Guide.
If you deploy the SAS 9 environment on Windows, you may have multiple SAS processes running on a single box (metadata process, OLAP server, multiple workspace servers). Windows Task Manager doesn't provide a great way to distinguish one sas.exe process from another, but Process Explorer does. Process Explorer lets you
My new favorite typeface for programming is Consolas, a font designed for use with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I use it there, but I now also use it for SAS programming. It uses ClearType technology, so the "crisp and clean" benefits kick in only when you have ClearType smoothing enabled.
How much time should be devoted to preparing for an important challenge? Depends on the challenge, I hear you say. From my experience, it is important to be aware of the challenges to be confronted when completing a significant project. Not under-estimating the real effort required, often depends on fitness