Robert has worked at SAS for over a quarter century, and his specialty is customizing graphs and maps - adding those little extra touches that help them answer your questions at a glance. His educational background is in Computer Science, and he holds a BS, MS, and PhD from NC State University.
You're sitting in a line of cars at the intersection, waiting for the light to change - when it finally turns green, the 2nd car just sits there for several seconds until someone honks at them, and then they scoot through the light ... but everyone behind them has to
A new prospective customer enters their personal information on your web page, and they want to have a sales rep contact them ... but you need to know which sales region they're in, so you can assign them to a sales team. Now, multiply that by thousands of prospective customers!
You've probably all seen the images of the passenger being forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight, to make room for airline staff flying on standby. The incident caused quite a bit of negative publicity, and quickly wiped out a quarter billion $ of the airline's market value. But did
SAS provides a map for each country, but there are likely other maps you want to use that SAS does not provide. If you have other maps in the Esri shapefile format, you're in luck - you can import those maps and use them! In this blog post I share
In recent versions of SAS/Graph, we have been shipping new/updated maps of each country, with 2 levels of detail (such as state & county, or province & division). But what if you only want a map showing the higher level of detail? In this blog post I share my third
Have you ever seen a map that just didn't look right to you? Perhaps the map area seemed squished or stretched? Perhaps this was because they used a different map projection than you were accustomed to. Or maybe the map coordinates weren't projected at all. In this blog post I
With the advent of things like car GPS & Google Maps, and a steady supply of nice maps from certain news sources (such as the New York Times), people have finally embraced the idea that mapping data can be very useful. And if you are into data visualization, you have
For those of you who don't have SAS/Graph's Proc GMap, I recently showed how to 'fake' a variety of maps using Proc SGplot polygons. So far I've written blogs on creating: pretty maps, gradient shaded choropleth maps, and maps with markers at zip codes. And now (by special request from
If you're into data visualization, here's something that might interest you - a free eBook showing several ways to use SAS to visually analyze your data. (Did I mention it's FREE?!?!) We've picked juicy chapters from several books and upcoming books (and a few other sources), to show you what
Users frequently ask how to plot their data as markers on a map. There are several ways to do this using SAS software. If you're a Visual Analytics user, you can do it using a point-and-click interface. But if you're a coder, you might need a little help... In this
Here in the US, it's the nationwide men's college basketball tournament season! Therefore let's use some data from the previous years' tournaments to sharpen our analytics & visualization skills... But before we get started, I must mention (brag?) that my alma mater, NC State University, won this tournament in 1983.
If you're a fan of SAS' ODS Graphics, you probably know that it does pretty much everything except geographical maps. But it's flexible enough that you can "fake it 'till you make it"! This example describes how to fake a geographical (choropleth) heat map using Proc SGplot polygons. In my
If you give an artist some tools, they can create a pretty picture. Sure, they might have a preferred tool - but they can probably do a pretty decent job no matter what you give them (paint, colored pencils, watercolor, charcoal, etc). And creating pretty graphs in SAS is no
When we send spacecraft from Earth to Mars, do the Martians consider them to be UFOs? I might not be able to answer that question definitively ... but I do have some really cool graphs showing the data for all those missions to Mars! You might remember a previous blog
The NC Scholastic Chess Championship is coming up this weekend, and my buddy Michael Thomas asked if I might could create a few graphs to help analyze the event data. How could I pass up an opportunity like that?!?! Read along, and find out what graphs I created, and the
Does your data just look like a bunch of dots? Would you like to bring those dots to life so they can tell their story? This example shows how to make some voter-registration dots a bit more lifelike, so you can see what they're saying. You can apply the same
Have you been using the SAS/Graph Gmap procedure to plot your data on maps for years, but never knew you could add roads to your maps?!? Follow along in this blog post, and I'll teach you how... But before we get started, here's a picture of a nice aerial view
Are your friends passing around clever memes (supposedly) featuring something your favorite actor said, or sharing news articles that you think might be "fake news"? If there's even a hint of data analyst in you, then you probably check the actual data, and confirm or disprove the supposed facts yourself. I
After the recent presidential election, I was updating my graphs of the voter registration data and noticed that the number of registered voters decreased after the election. At first I thought that was odd, but then I realized that maybe inactive voters were being purged. I wanted to find out
A topic that's been in the news a lot lately is the presidential power to grant pardons, commutations, and such. But all the articles I've seen just quoted numeric totals - I haven't seen a graph of the data anywhere! So I set out to find the data and graph
Doing business in a global economy, have you ever found yourself wanting to show Chinese (or Korean, or Japanese) labels on a map? If so, then this blog is for you! Before we get started, here is a photo of some Chinese characters to get you into the mood. This
I usually create very technical maps, to display data spatially - and they usually have a certain look. They're clear, crisp, and to the point. I typically only use color to represent the data, and I choose a font that is simple and easy to read (such as arial). But
Are you one of those people who get easily bored at amusement parks? Would you like something to do while your friends/family are waiting in line for a ride? Perhaps I have an alternate idea, to keep you busy - survey markers! When surveyors are measuring and marking areas for
"They'll eat you out of house & home! Their food bill will put you in the poor house! ... And they never gain an ounce!" - That's what my friends say about their teenage sons. They're probably exaggerating a little, but since it's a recurring theme, there's probably some truth
Here in the US, it's Girl Scout cookie season. This is when you get to spend a few bucks on cookies, break your New Year's resolution about losing weight ... and feel good about it, because the money's going to a good cause. Or is it? - Let's break down
For many years, the Toyota Prius was the hybrid with the best mpg - but in 2017 that's changing! Let's examine the data ... For analyses like this, I have found the fueleconomy.gov website to be a wonderful source of information. In recent years, they've even made all their data
They say "a picture is worth 1000 words" - and I think it might be more like 2000 when it comes to planning out fun/interesting things to do in a new city! I'm going to the SAS Global Forum (#SASGF) conference in Orlando this year, and I was wondering where
If you do much traveling in the United States, you're bound to hear a few words and expressions that are unique to certain areas. Well y'all get ready, because I'm fixin' to analyze some of those words for ya! I recently found a really neat web application called The Great
Data analysis can be used for many things ... how about finding other beers you might like, so you don't keep drinking the same old brand every time? Hang on tight - I think we're about to make a beer run! I recently read an interesting article on the Flowingdata website,
Are you a visualization & graphing expert? Can you identify which tool (R, Excel, Tableau, SPSS, Matlab, JS, Python, or SAS) was used to create each of these graphs? No cheating! I recently read Tim Matteson's blog where he presented 18 graphs, and had his readers try to guess which
