+Chris Hemedinger is the Director of SAS User Engagement, which includes our SAS Communities and SAS User Groups. Since 1993, Chris has worked for SAS as an author, a software developer, an R&D manager and a consultant. Inexplicably, Chris is still coasting on the limited fame he earned as an author of SAS For Dummies.
Almost daily, I hear reports of scientific studies in which the researchers have used SAS for the data analysis. Typically I don't dig into the details because, frankly, the studies are usually way over my head. But this one about the effect of nut storage, nut size, and nut soaking
Thanks to the folks who support our web presence, this blog page has just received a facelift (but alas, the blogger has not). New colors, easier navigation with the breadcrumbs up top, and a new banner image that shows the SAS for Dummies cover (as if to say, "really, he's
Read how Stacey and Christine are working to join the ranks of the certified (and not the certifiable, we hope). I'm sure that PROC CERTIFY (as they've dubbed it) is an example of one proc that won't end with a QUIT; but with a RUN;
Most modern programmer text editors allow you to see multiple views of the document you're working on. The SAS program editor within SAS Enterprise Guide is no exception, although we've done a pretty good job of hiding this feature. Read on and learn how to easily "divide and conquer" your
I was recently reviewing our most popular samples that we publish on support.sas.com, and I came across this one showing unusual uses for the ROUND function. As well as gathering lots of visits, this sample has also earned a very respectable rating by you, the readers. I note that we
This is one of the coolest uses of SAS I've seen: optimizing school reassignments. I spoke with paper coauthor Rob Pratt before SAS Global Forum this year about this topic. I found the project's origin interesting: CEO Jim Goodnight was chatting with the Wake County Schools superintendant at a cocktail
Have you ever submitted a SAS program or query only to immediately regret it? It usually happens just as you finish clicking the mouse or lift your finger from the F8 key: you realize that your program has a horrible flaw that's going to make it run for hours or
From SAS/ACCESS (for working with databases) to SAS/ZODIAC* (for cranking out horoscopes), you'll be able to learn all you need to know about SAS products with the new product pages on support.sas.com. As of today, we're featuring just a handful of popular products within these pages. The product pages serve
In a previous posting I showed an example of how you can use the GKPI procedure in SAS 9.2 to create dashboard-quality charts. Here's a more formal sample that you can use, including a custom task that you can use in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 to point-and-click your way the
Can a crowd of thousands produce better answers than a few experts? That's the question that Sir Francis Galton asked in the 19th century and sought to statistically prove, one way or another. I recently watched an entertaining and informative segment about Galton and the so-called "wisdom of crowds" on
Geoff posted a nice article on his blog about how you can read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets programmatically from within SAS, without using DDE. I've previously written about how it's difficult to continue using DDE from SAS when you have a distributed environment (SAS on a server machine, Excel
"DEV/TEST/PROD": If that term means something to you, then you are probably among our many customers that use SAS software across different environments. You might have one SAS environment for playing around ("dev" for "development"), another for testing candidate changes ("test"), and yet another for production processes ("prod"). Or, you
If you use or have used SAS Web Report Studio, the SAS usability folks want to talk to you. Here is a call for participation: Dear Web Report Studio Users, In order to make SAS Web Report Studio (WRS) a better reporting tool, WRS will be conducting a few different
I just read about how Bill Gates has too many friends to keep up with on Facebook. Social networking is tough for social butterflies like Bill and myself. If only there was some sort of tool to help me sift through my friend data and help me categorize it.
When you create SAS Enterprise Guide projects, what's your approach? Do you cram the process flow with thousands of nodes? Do you create different projects for each work task? Do you like one big SAS program? Or a bunch of little programs all linked together? That's the question that Michael
Last year I posted a method to "mine" Twitter tweets for public sentiment after the vice-presidential debate. Patrick McLeod (University of Texas) recently posted an article showing how he adapted the method to analyze a category of tweets with the #iranelection tag. You can do fancier tricks with SAS and
SAS programmers can often be (um...let's see...how best to put this...) set in their ways -- at least when it comes to their SAS work. This is due in part to the nature of SAS. The SAS program that you wrote 20 years ago in Version 5 probably still works
AnnMaria's blog describing her acceptance of SAS Enterprise Guide, despite the shortcomings she's found, reminded me of this Irish Spring commercial. I'd like to take the time to craft a more thoughtful response to her post, but that will have to wait for a less-hectic day. In the meantime, I
SAS-sponsored podcasts, including a few from yours truly, are available on www.sas.com. Interested in hearing from a variety of SAS authors? There are dozens of interviews available on the SAS Press site. For example, listen to the authors of the "Little SAS Book" series, Susan and Lora, as they reveal
The content for this post comes from David Henderson, lead software developer for the SAS Web Parts for Microsoft Sharepoint. David talks about these and other ideas for SAS-Sharepoint integration in his SAS Global Forum paper. We are pleased to announce the availability of SAS Web Parts 1.1 for Microsoft
"…the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians…" That's a quote from Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist. It surfaced in an online interview months ago, but it's been getting a lot of play lately. Mr. Varian goes on to say: The ability to take data—to be able
Just last week I posted about Jim Davis joining the blogging fray, and now here comes SAS Exceutive VP Mikael Hagström with his own blog, ominously titled "In the Final Analysis". If this keeps up, my entire SAS Dummy blog will be spent announcing other SAS blogs. Well, you don't
You might be the sort of person who loves to wait indefinitely. You visit the DMV regularly to tweak your auto registration. You queue up in the supermarket checkout line behind the customer most likely to require "price checks". You map your daily commute along the routes that offer the
Jim Davis, Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS: welcome to the SAS blogosphere. Jim is a great communicator and has a tremendous rapport with SAS customers; I'm sure that his blog will prove that out. I remember first meeting Jim way back shortly after he joined SAS. This
NCSU statistics students: welcome to SAS Hall, your new home for higher learning. I'm glad they named it SAS Hall; "Sall Hall" is a bit too rhymey and "Goodnight Hall" might encourage classroom sleepiness.
Question: What do you get when you cross your Facebook friends with SAS analytics? Answer: Insight, probably more about yourself than anything else. You can tell a lot about yourself by looking at your friends. And I'll bet that so can Facebook and those who advertise on it. Data from
AnnMaria artfully qualifies her use of the word "lovely" as she describes her experience with one of our SAS customer representatives. The whole reason for the encounter: AnnMaria needed to get the correct sort of software order so that she and her colleagues can run SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise
Recoding values is one of the most common data prep tasks that folks need to do before they can analyze and report on data. In SAS, the most elegant way to handle this is by applying a SAS format. A SAS format allows you to "bucket" a bunch of raw
The SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 tutorial is going global, with translated versions now hitting the SAS support site. First up, after the English version, are Italian and German. Other languages will soon follow. Update 22Apr2009: just added French and Spanish as well. This represents a couple of firsts for us:
The mainstream press never misses an opportunity to point out how our children are falling behind in math skills and won't be able to compete in the global marketplace. But I don't believe it, and I'll tell you why. For centuries, children have used counting rhymes to select a person
