+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.
One thing that we have a lot of at SAS: installations of SAS software that we can run. I have SAS for Windows on my laptop, and I have access to many centralized instances of SAS that run on Linux and Windows servers. (I also have access to mainframe SAS,
SAS Technical Support has earned a wonderful reputation for being friendly, knowledgeable, and thorough. Every customer that I talk to is delighted by the experience. That's why what I'm about to say might be heresy, but here it goes. If you have a question about how to accomplish a task
Yesterday a frustrated SAS user complained on Twitter. He's working with a database that stores an ID field as a big long number (perhaps using the database BIGINT type), and SAS can't display a number greater than 15 digits. Well, it's actually 16 digits, depending on the value: %put Biggest
As a parent of children who love books, I can tell you that there is something humorous about taking a first name, adding a "Mc" and then a rhyming surname to make up a brand new character name. My daughters always loved to read the adventures of Harry Mclary from
What's the most common data reporting mechanism? Is it web-based reporting? PDFs? How about spreadsheets? Maybe, but in my experience many reports are delivered using a less-scalable and transient mechanism: e-mail. I'm a data steward at SAS. Specifically, I look after the operational data around our blogging program and our
We've just celebrated Earth Day, but I'm here to talk about Jupyter -- and the SAS open source project that opens the door for more learning. With this new project on the github.com/sassoftware page, SAS contributes new support for running SAS from within Jupyter Notebooks -- a popular browser-based environment
I know what you're thinking: two "Boaty McBoatface" articles within two weeks? And we're past April Fool's Day? But since I posted my original analysis about the "Name our ship" phenomenon that's happening in the UK right now, a new contender has appeared: Poppy-Mai. The cause of Poppy-Mai, a critically
In a voting contest, is it possible for a huge population to get behind a ridiculous candidate with such force that no other contestant can possibly catch up? The answer is: Yes. Just ask the folks at NERC, the environmental research organization in the UK. They are commissioning a new
In previous articles, I've shared tips about how you can work with SAS and ZIP files without requiring an external tool like WinZip, gzip, or 7-Zip. I've covered: How to create ZIP files with ODS PACKAGE ZIP (available since SAS 9.2) How to "unzip" and read ZIP files using FILENAME
Have you ever been in a meeting in which a presenter is showing content on a web page -- but the audience can't read it because it's too small? Then a guy sitting in the back of the room yells, "Control plus!". Because, as we all know (right?), "Ctrl+" is
Last week I described how to use PROC IOMOPERATE to list the active SAS sessions that have been spawned in your SAS environment. I promised that I would share a custom task that simplifies the technique. Today I'm sharing that task with you. How to get the SAS Spawned Processes
If you're a SAS administrator, you probably know that you can use SAS Management Console to view active SAS processes. These are the SAS sessions that have been spawned by clients such as SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, or those running SAS stored processes. But did
There are SAS users, and then there are SAS Super Users in the SAS Support Communities. What makes a communities user "Super"? It's the Super Users that fly around the discussion boards -- answering questions and guiding other community members. They aren't just SAS experts; they are teachers as well,
TL;DR The next time that you find yourself writing a PROC SORT step, verify that you're working with the SAS Base engine and not a database. If your data is in a database, skip the SORT! The details: When to skip the PROC SORT step Many SAS procedures allow you
When he filmed the scene in the summer of '69, my Dad did not foresee his moment of fame in 2016. But in the last two days, Dad has seen his 47-year-old work appear in the local Buffalo, NY media, on DailyMail.com, and on FOX News*. In August of 1969,
The ODS statement controls most aspects of how SAS creates your output results. You use it to specify the destination type (HTML, PDF, RTF, EXCEL or something else), as well as the details of those destinations: file paths, appearance styles, graphics behaviors, and more. The most common use pattern is
I recently met SAS user "CSC" at the Analytics 2015 conference. It might be generous to say that he's an avid user of SAS Enterprise Guide; it's probably more accurate to say that he's now accustomed to the tool and he's once again productive. But he still misses some features
Rick Wicklin created a nice example of using the SURFACEPLOTPARM statement to create a surface plot in SAS. As I read it, the question that immediately came to mind was: can I use this to create the famous SAS cowboy hat? The "cowboy hat" is a highly distributed example of
One of my new favorite activities is perusing the memorable transcripts from our Live Chat program. Lida: Hi! Welcome to Live Chat! I'm here to help. Lida: May I please have your name and company? Visitor: My name is Bill Smith and I'm with ABC. Visitor: how many offices do
Update 02Dec2016: Beginning with SAS 9.4 Maintenance 4, there is now a JSON libname engine. Read this new article to learn more -- you might prefer it to using DS2 for this task! Thanks to the proliferation of cloud services and REST-based APIs, SAS users have been making use of
In my local paper this morning, I read about how a North Carolina state commission plans to recommend changes to our teaching standards for mathematics. One of the topics that they want to bring back: Roman numerals. Why? According to my exhaustive 30 seconds of Internet research, the only practical
While I've often written about how to get your SAS data to Microsoft Excel in some automated way, I haven't really addressed what's probably the most frequently used method: copy and paste. SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 added a nifty little feature that makes copy-and-paste even more useful. The new "Copy
With apologies to this candy advertisement from the 1980s: "Hey, you got your Lua in my SAS program." "You got your SAS code in my Lua program!" Announcer: "PROC LUA: Two great programming languages that program great together!" What is Lua? It's an embeddable scripting language that is often used
I returned to work from a 2+ week vacation this morning. When I fired up SAS Enterprise Guide (as I do each work day and occasionally on weekends), I was greeted with this message: As a SAS insider, I knew this was coming. It's a new feature that was added
I've seen some crazy process flows in SAS Enterprise Guide. Crazy-big, and crazy-complex, used by real customers to accomplish real work. But while these process flows represent a ton of work, this is usually a calculated investment to automate processes that would be difficult to capture in another way. For
If you have not yet discovered the new Ask the Expert series on the SAS Training site, you are missing out on a treasure. Visit the site right now and review all of the available topics, from "Newbie" to Analytics to Visualization to good ol' SAS programming. Go on; I'll
The XLSX libname engine in SAS allows you to read and write Microsoft Excel files in the same way that you can work with other data sets and databases. This article describes the basic (and some limitations) of the XLSX engine.
Are you a VIEWTABLE fan from the SAS Windowing Environment (a.k.a. Display Manager, DMS, PC SAS)? If so, the latest version of SAS Enterprise Guide has a new feature that you'll love. With the latest update to SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 (7.11), you can now subset your data in the
I've written about how to use the FILENAME ZIP method to read and update ZIP files in your SAS programs. The ZIP method was added in SAS 9.4, and its advantage is that you can accomplish more in SAS without having to launch external utilities such as WinZip, gunzip, or
I watched with wonder as each of my daughters learned how to "tell time." Early in their primary school careers, they brought home worksheets that featured clock faces with big-hand/little-hand configurations that they had to decipher, and exercises that asked them to draw the hands as they should appear given
