+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.
How to extract driving patterns by using smartphone sensors -- especially the accelerometer. With accelerometer readings in hand, you can use spectral analysis and other techniques to decompose events, and machine learning to match differentiate from patterns of risky drivers.
How can you use analytics to design better biopsies and improve outcomes? This high school student has some ideas, and she presented them at Analytics Experience 2018.
To succeed in any data-focused hackathon, you need a robust set of tools and skills – as well as a can-do attitude. Here's what you can expect from any hackathon: Messy data. It might come from a variety of sources, and won't necessarily be organized for analytics or reporting. That's
Using relative file paths in your SAS programs? Use the new DLGCDIR function to manage your SAS working directory -- even in SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Studio -- to ensure your programs are working the way they ought to.
"Code golf" is a fun programming pastime that challenges you to solve a problem with the least amount of code possible. Like regular golf, the goal is to use fewest code "strokes" to hit the mark. Here's a recent challenge that was posted to me via Twitter. @cjdinger @SASJedi got
SAS programmers have long wanted the ability to control the flow of their SAS programs without having to resort to complex SAS macro programming. With SAS 9.4 Maintenance 5, it's now supported! You can now use %IF-%THEN-%ELSE constructs in open code. This is big news -- even if it only
At SAS, we love data. Data is central to our corporate vision: to transform a world of data into a world of intelligence. We're also famous for enjoying M&Ms, but to us they are more than a sweet snack. They're also another source of data. My colleague Pete Privitera, with
I've said it before: spreadsheets are not databases. However, many of us use spreadsheets as if they were databases, and then we struggle when the spreadsheet layout does not support database-style rigor of predictable rows, columns, and variable types -- the basic elements we need for analytics and reporting. If
WARNING: This blog post references Avengers: Infinity War and contains story spoilers. But it also contains useful information about random number generators (RNGs) -- tempting! If you haven't yet seen the movie, you should make peace with this inner conflict before reading on. Throughout the movie, Thanos makes it clear
The title of this blog says what you really need to know: SAS Enterprise Guide does have a future, and it's a bright one. Ever since SAS Studio debuted in 2014, onlookers have speculated about its impact on the development of SAS Enterprise Guide. I think that we have been
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is famous for inventing the World Wide Web and for the construction of URLs -- a piece of syntax that every 8-year-old is now familiar with. According to the lore, when Sir Tim invented URLs he did not imagine that Internet surfers of all ages and backgrounds
Using SAS with REST APIs is fun and rewarding, but it's also complicated. When you're dealing with web services, credentials, data parsing and security, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. It's useful to have a simple program that verifies that the "basic plumbing" is working before
Is it time to add SAS to the list of "romance" languages?*. It's no secret that there are enthusiastic SAS programmers who love the SAS language. So it only makes sense that sometimes, these programmers will "nerd out" and express their adoration for fellow humans by using the code that
I've used SAS with a bunch of different REST APIs: GitHub, Brightcove, Google Analytics, Lithium, LinkedIn, and more. For most of these I have to send user/password or "secret" application tokens to the web service so that it knows who I am and what data I can retrieve. I do
If you work in a team environment, you might be accustomed to using mapped network drives for source data folders or to publish results. If you've recently moved to a SAS server environment, you might not have those mapped drives available. How can you tell? This question was posted on
The internet is rich with data, and much of that data seems to exist only on web pages, which -- for some crazy reason -- are designed for humans to read. When students/researchers want to apply data science techniques to analyze collect and analyze that data, they often turn to
Social media has brought anniversary dates to the forefront. Every day, my view of Google Photos or Facebook shows me a collection of photos from exactly some number of years ago to remind me of how good things were back then. These apps are performing the simplest of date-based math
SAS 9.4 Maintenance 5 includes new support for reading and writing GZIP files directly. GZIP files, usually found with a .gz file extension, are a different format than ZIP files. Although both are forms of compressed files, a GZIP file is usually a compressed copy of a single file, whereas
It's time to share another tip about working with ZIP files in SAS. Since I first wrote about FILENAME ZIP to list and extract files from a ZIP archive, readers have been asking for more. Specifically, they want additional details about the files that are contained in a ZIP, including
News flash: My favorite SAS code editor is SAS Enterprise Guide. However, my favorite general purpose text editor is Notepad++, and I often find myself using that tool for viewing SAS log files and for making small modifications to SAS programs. Judging from the popularity of this SAS Support Communities
SAS programmers have high expectations for their coding environment, and why shouldn't they? Companies have a huge investment in their SAS code base, and it's important to have tools that help you understand that code and track changes over time. Few things are more satisfying as a SAS program that
Many years ago I shared a custom task that allows you to view and manage SAS catalogs within SAS Enterprise Guide. As a reminder, a SAS catalog is a special type of SAS file that acts as a container, like a folder, for a variety of content items called catalog
I use SAS Enterprise Guide every day, and for a wide variety of tasks. As a result, I have a huge collection of project files (EGP files) and SAS program files. I have always relied on the "recently used" list in the File menu to provide me with quick access
SAS power users (and actually, power users of any application) like to customize their environment for maximum productivity. Long-time SAS users remember the KEYS window in SAS display manager, which allows you to assign SAS commands to "hot keys" in your SAS session. These users will invest many hours to
If you spend a lot of time in SAS Enterprise Guide (as I do), you probably get to know its features pretty well. But we don't always take the time to explore as we should, so there might be a few golden nuggets of editor knowledge that have escaped you
One of the big benefits of SAS Viya is how approachable it is for programmers of other languages. You don't have to learn SAS in order to become productive quickly. We've seen a lot of interest from people who code in Python, maybe because that language has become known for
When SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office was first created over a decade ago, SAS programmers were told to check their skills at the door. This new product was for non-programmers only. SAS programmers were invited to contribute to the experience by packaging their code in SAS stored processes, which end
In his recent article Perceptions of probability, Rick Wicklin explores how vague statements about "likeliness" translate into probabilities that we can express numerically. It's a fun, informative post -- I recommend it! You'll "Almost Certainly" enjoy it. To prepare the article, Rick first had to download the source data from
Every day before I even wake up, I have little "SAS robots" that do work for me. These are SAS batch jobs that gather data from external services and build data marts, generate reports, and send e-mail. One of those SAS jobs gathers Google Analytics data about our SAS blogs
Thanks to a new open source project from SAS, Python coders can now bring the power of SAS into their Python scripts. The project is SASPy, and it's available on the SAS Software GitHub. It works with SAS 9.4 and higher, and requires Python 3.x. I spoke with Jared Dean
