+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.
For the third year now, I'll be hosting the SAS Tech Talk shows at SAS Global Forum. (Since I've been invited back I can assume that I'm more of an Ellen DeGeneres than a Seth MacFarlane.) These shows feature SAS technical experts (mostly from SAS R&D) who are prepared to
My teenage daughter is a self-appointed anglophile. She's a big fan of British movies and TV shows such as Doctor Who and Sherlock, and although she has not yet visited the UK (an injustice for which she blames her father), she considers the place to be her homeland. In an
SAS administrators now have another tool to keep SAS users from straying off their permitted path: the LOCKDOWN system option. The option was introduced in "stealth mode" for SAS 9.4. In SAS 9.4M1, it became a true, documented option. For the official guide to creating "locked-down servers", see the SAS
Last week's SAS Talks session, My Favorite SAS Enterprise Guide 5.1 Tricks, was remarkable in several ways. First, the featured presenter was Marje Fecht, who also serves as the conference chair for SAS Global Forum 2014. She's an avid SAS professional who loves to educate her fellow SAS users on
It's true: you can use the Microsoft Visual Studio Express tools to build custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. And I said as much in my book, Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET. I even provided step-by-step instructions for how
This isn't the first blog post to laud the "Note" feature of SAS Enterprise Guide. You know, the feature that allows you to add documentation to describe what the heck your project or process flow is actually doing. For example, Tricia described 3 useful ways to use the note feature.
Need to read or update a ZIP file within your SAS program? In SAS 9.4, you can use the FILENAME ZIP access method to do the job. Explanation and examples here!
SAS users are big data consumers and big data creators. Often, we have to deal in large data files (or many smaller files) -- and that means ZIP compression. ZIP compression tools such as gzip, 7-Zip, and WinZip are ubiquitous, but they aren't always convenient to use from within a
I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Marje Fecht was selected as the conference chair for SAS Global Forum 2014. This was April 2011, and I was at PURE Nightclub in Las Vegas. That's not my usual "clubbing" scene, but we were at the kickback party for
Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Analysis (or RFM) is a popular customer segmentation technique employed by database marketers everywhere. Marketers use RFM to identify which customers are most likely to respond to a direct marketing campaign. The model takes into account three simple metrics: How recently did the customer buy from
SHA256 and other hash functions are supported in SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya. It's better than MD5 as a cryptographic hash!
Because I began my SAS career in the Publications division, I like to think that I have a keen eye when it comes to SAS documentation. When I first visited the SAS 9.4 online documentation, I immediately noticed that it had a different look. Examine the image below; can you
My children learned this skill early in life: when you want to secure permission for a questionable activity (say, "watch 5 hours of Phineas and Ferb" or "eat a bowl of candy for breakfast"), you should approach the most lenient adult in the household. In my early days of fatherhood,
If there's anyone who represents the global nature of SAS software, it's Falko Schulz. He's a German who lives in Brisbane, Australia while he works for SAS R&D based in Cary, NC. Falko works on the team that produces SAS Visual Analytics, specifically the "explorer" portion of the tool. He
Writing a book about SAS (or any computer software) is both gratifying and frustrating. It's gratifying because there are so many SAS users in the world, and it feels good when you can share your expertise with them. It's also gratifying to have a volume that you can point to
The holiday season is here, and you're probably wondering how to shop for that picky SAS Enterprise Guide user on your gift list. I've got a few ideas for you, and the price is right! Here are links to 11 custom tasks that are free to download, easy to install,
Microsoft Windows 8 has been with us for a year, and its first major update -- Windows 8.1 -- has just arrived. So how does SAS support these Windows 8 platforms? The answer can be found on support.sas.com in SAS Note 46876. I'll summarize it here: SAS 9.3 and SAS
Okay, given the title of this article, I might be overselling the content a bit. Read on to see if your life will be transformed. I've just returned from SESUG, and this question came up during one of the presentations. While this tip might seem basic, it was news to
I'm currently at the SESUG conference with hundreds of SAS users. I've presented a few talks, and I've attended a few more. The presentation rooms can be large and dimly lit, and the projectors at these conference hotels are not always the brightest nor are they exactly "high def". To
The other day I showed how to check your data cardinality by using a simple SAS program. I also promised to provide a custom task that makes the process even easier within SAS Enterprise Guide. Today I'm delivering on that promise. I've just added the custom task to the support.sas.com
Although the NSA and news media have given metadata a bad name in the popular press, the fact remains that information about the nature of your data is extremely valuable. For example, I posted an article yesterday about data cardinality. Cardinality measures the uniqueness of values in a variable. Cardinality
Data cardinality is an important topic for for data analysis. In mathematical terms, cardinality is simply the number of elements in a set. But in data applications, cardinality signifies the number of unique values for a given field of data. Related terms include number of levels (thank you, PROC FREQ
The Inside SAS Global Forum video series has been officially launched for 2014. Yes, the conference is still several months away, but it is not too soon to plan! Your first item of business: submit your proposal for content. Then next: register for the conference. Anna Brown and I provide
Don't ask me how it happened, but in my quest for even more SAS fame, I managed to muscle my way onto the set for Inside SAS Global Forum, the video series that focuses on everything that you need to know about SAS Global Forum 2014. After a brief cooling
Traditionally, SAS users like their processes to behave like Ron Popeil's famous rotisserie: they want to set it and forget it. That's the definition of a batch process. You work like heck to get it ready to run, then you push the button (or schedule it) and walk away. But
Has this ever happened to you? You have a SAS program with statements that you wrote, then you make use of a macro function or %include file supplied by a helpful colleague, and when your SAS code resumes, you find that all of your SAS titles have been changed out
A couple of years ago I shared a method for copying any file within a SAS program. It was a simple approach, copying the file byte-by-byte from one fileref (SAS file reference) to another. My colleague Bruno Müller, a SAS trainer in Switzerland, has since provided a much more robust
SAS Data Management is a popular topic here on the SAS interwebs. You can find all types of information ranging from thought leadership to white papers to product details. At SAS Global Forum I sat down with Nancy Rausch, one of the principal R&D managers behind the SAS Data Management
It's been almost 5 years since I posted one of the first custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide. It was a task that made it easier to convert SPSS data files into SAS data sets. Like many projects that begin as custom tasks, this one later became a feature in
In SAS 9.4, the SAS programming language continues add new features by the truckload. I've already discussed PROC DELETE (which is actually an old feature, but like an 80s hit song it's now back with a better version). In this SAS Tech Talk video from SAS Global Forum 2013, I
