A comment to last week's article on "How to get data values out of ODS graphics" indicated that the technique would be useful for changing the title on an ODS graph "without messing around with GTL." You can certainly use the technique for that purpose, but if you want to
This week's SAS tip comes from Peter Westfall, Randall Tobias, and Russell Wolfinger and their book Multiple Comparisons and Multiple Tests Using SAS, Second Edition. If you're interested in this topic, additional bonus content includes a free chapter from the book. The following excerpt is from SAS Press authors Peter Westfall, Randall Tobias,
Writing a book (especially for SAS Press) is an incredible experience. If you are playing with the thought of doing so, I highly recommend that you proceed with this idea. You’ll get a much better structured view of your favorite topic, learn a lot about yourself, and enter a very
My family recently rescued two lovable Labrador Retrievers: Jake 9 and Tar 7. Neither of them are great retrievers but we recently taught Tar how to pick up tennis balls off of a cupcake pan to find treats below. While this may not seem like a big accomplishment, it is
Many SAS procedures can produce ODS statistical graphics as naturally as they produce tables. Did you know that it is possible to obtain the numbers underlying an ODS statistical graph? This post shows how. Suppose that a SAS procedure creates a graph that displays a curve and that you want
My sleep patterns are erratic (and somewhat torturous) – they range from sleeping solidly for eight hours a clip to me wandering aimlessly about the house at 3am. Unfortunately, the latter was the reality during the wee hours of Friday, July 20; I was up watching ESPN (my typical late
Hopefully you know that a gif animation can be used for more than just showing a cartoon animal doing cute tricks! Being a savvy data-meister, I'm sure you are also aware that you can use gif animations to see how data changes over time. But perhaps you didn't know you could
If you need to calculate the mean, sum, standard deviation, or frequency count for a variable, you'll find it pretty easy to accomplish in SAS Enterprise Guide. The corresponding tasks in the menus have names like "Summary Statistics" or "One-way Frequencies". Obvious, right? Often, researchers or students have a quest
Just over the border between England and Wales lies the small town of Hay-on-Wye, reputed to have more bookshops per head of population than any other town in the world. Each year for ten days in spring the Hay Literary Festival is run, and Hay becomes the only place in
I received the following question: In the DATA step I always use the ** operator to raise a values to a power, like this: x**2. But on your blog I you use the ## operator to raise values to a power in SAS/IML programs. Does SAS/IML not support the **
Uncontrolled product proliferation can have bad consequences, and these are well recognized. There is certainly extra cost and complexity in managing more SKUs (rather than fewer SKUs). And it is unlikely that each new offering adds entirely incremental volume. Instead, the increased product overlap just leads to increased self-cannibalization. We
In honor of the 2012 Olympics, this week’s SAS tip is from award-winning UK author Phil Mason and his book In the Know...SAS Tips and Techniques from Around the Globe, Second Edition. SAS user Ron Fehd proclaimed Phil Mason "one of the SAS user community's famous creative tinkerers--the SAS user version
Fire department operations are very complex, with multi-faceted missions that include not only fire prevention and suppression, but emergency response and fire inspections. These must be coordinated with area growth and development decisions, and water system management decisions. When a fire or an emergency occurs, the right equipment, with the right people,
When working with "big data" you usually have too many points to view in a plot, and end up subsetting or summarizing the data. But now, in SAS 9.3, you have an alternative! For example, the following scatter plot of 10,000+ points is just a visual "blob": But using a new
New books, SAS certification guides, and all-time favorites topped the bestseller list during the second quarter of 2012. Are you using any of these titles? The Little SAS Book: A Primer, Fourth Edition SAS Certification Prep Guide: Base Programming for SAS 9, Third Edition Learning SAS by Example: A Programmer's
Last week I wrote an article in which I pointed out that many SAS programmers write a simulation in SAS by writing a macro loop. This approach is extremely inefficient, so I presented a more efficient technique. Not only is the macro loop approach slow, but there are other undesirable
Think that you have a good excuse for not completing that SAS users group conference paper, technical article, or SAS Press book chapter? Well, whatever your excuse is, I’ve got a bigger one. Really! Things at the office are so busy that you need to take work home? I can
Economist and statistician Kattamuri Sarma and his book Predictive Modeling with SAS Enterprise Miner are the source for this week's SAS tip. In a review of the book, SAS user Andrea Wainwright-Zimmerman said "The content is wonderful, clear, and thorough." If you're using SAS Enterprise Miner, I'd invite you to visit Kattamuri Sarma's
US Presidential Race Going to the Dogs Mitt Romney transporting his dog on the roof rack. Barack Obama eating dog meat as a child in Indonesia. Former candidate Rick Santorum overwrought about man-dog love. Is this what the US Presidential race has turned into -- one dog attack after another? Back in
With the London 2012 Olympics around the corner, there are sure to be reports or rumors of performance-enhancing drug use among some athletes. It turns out that using manufactured chemicals to give yourself an edge is frowned upon in the athletic community. However, as a SAS user you should avail
If you've heard anything from SAS in recent months, then you've heard about high-performance analytics and the new SAS Visual Analytics offering. SAS has taken the high-performance analytics message around the world in a series of recent "road shows". From the start, this project has enjoyed a different development process
We've introduced the topic of the Four E's and discussed the role of analytics in Enforcement and Engineering. Now let's delve into Emergency Response. A quick emergency response can make all the difference in saving the lives of crash victims. Many vehicles can now communicate directly with emergency responders immediately after
Over the past few years, and especially since I posted my article on eight tips to make your simulation run faster, I have received many emails (often with attached SAS programs) from SAS users who ask for advice about how to speed up their simulation code. For this reason, I
My suitcase is out and ready to be packed because I’ll soon make a cross-country trip to San Diego for JSM 2012. I, along with my colleague Brenda Hairston, will manage the SAS Books booth in the Exhibit Hall from July 29-Aug. 1. Be sure to visit us and take a
A SAS Professionals attendee and Twitter follower named Marco asks for help: ..struggling to find a method with custom tasks in EG to be able to list the datasets in a library, can you help please? Sure, no problem. This is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. First, make sure that you have a reference
I have blogged about three different SAS/IML techniques that iterate over categories and process the observations in each category. The three techniques are as follows: Use a WHERE clause on the READ statement to read only the observations in the ith category. This is described in the article "BY-group processing
Jack Shostak is the Associate Director of Statistics at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. A SAS user since 1985, Jack has two SAS books under his belt with a third on the way. This week's SAS tip is from Shotak's SAS Programming in the Pharmaceutical Industry. The following excerpt is from SAS Press
Free The BFD The BFD has been on a short hiatus, fending off potential litigation with the organizing committee of a quadrennial international sporting event that isn't the World Cup. Per the advice of SAS Legal, I've had to make a few changes to the May 30 post, now entitled "Forecasting
I was recently following a post where a user asked what the earliest SAS PROCs (procedures) were. Since I started using SAS in 1970, I knew I could find a copy of the old documentation that we used at that time. This “user’s guide” was something that you printed out on
Most management literature and studies posit that organizations with a clear mission and work objectives, understood by all levels of the organization, are the most productive. The key to that success is effectively communicating the mission, agreeing on key performance indicators and giving employees at all levels access to relevant
