When you connect to a SAS environment with SAS Enterprise Guide, are you a single, consistent person? Or do you have more identities than Chevy Chase in Fletch? When you connect to a SAS environment, you can be many people at once: You are logged into your Windows account on
The SAS Talks series is a big hit, and now we've got a landing page where you can find previously recorded talks, plus information about upcoming talks. You can learn about SAS programming with SAS Enterprise Guide, ODS statistical graphics, fancy multi-sheet output for Microsoft Excel from SAS, and more!
Check out AnnMaria's blog covering what she's learned by being on the bleeding edge: using SAS 9.2 for Windows x64 on a Win7 virtual machine. Also, her short primer on XPT files makes me want to add some native capability into SAS Enterprise Guide. If your goal is to send
Which versions of MySQL are supported by SAS 9.1.3 for Windows? Is the 64-bit version of Oracle 11g supported on the 64-bit version of SAS 9.2 on Linux? You can find the answers to these questions and others like it by consulting the SAS/ACCESS Validation Matrix: pick your SAS version,
Within SAS, we have a strong blogging community made up of SAS employees. Those of us who read or contribute to the blog content on the internal SAS web got a special "shout out" from Fortune magazine, within its coverage of SAS as the top workplace in the USA. The
I've been to a bunch of SAS Global Forum (née SUGI) events over the years. I always look forward to going, because I always think that by being there in person, I'll be able to provide some customers with exactly the information they need to use SAS better. And I
As you use the Query Builder task in SAS Enterprise Guide, you might notice that it refers to tables and computed columns using names that are different than you expect. For example, instead of a table named CANDY_SALES_HISTORY, the Query Builder might show t1. This is called an alias, and
Andy wrote in the NOTE: blog that he's stumbled upon a few custom tasks to extend features in SAS Enterprise Guide. He wondered aloud whether there might be more "free" tasks out there, available for use by anyone who can find them and download them. The answer is: You betcha!*
In case you missed the business news last week, SAS (the company that pays me to write this blog, and the leader in business analytics) was named #1 on the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For 2010 list. Having been a user (and huge fan) of SAS software since
Subtitle: An accounting of accounts which, by all accounts, you should hold accountable. With the introduction of the SAS metadata server for use with SAS Business Intelligence, the role of the SAS administrator became more important. In SAS 9.1.3 a number of new standard "accounts" -- user IDs that serve
The easiest option is to simply move your 9.2 format catalog to Lev1/SASApp/SASEnvironment/SASFormats/formats.sas7bcat. But you can also modify your SASv9.cfg configuration file to point to a different location: -set fmtlib1 "E:sharedformats" -fmtsearch (fmtlib1.formats) So e:sharedformats is a shared location for the format catalog, and formats (filename formats.sas7bcat) is the name
This sign greeted me as I was driving into work this morning for a routine appointment at our onsite health care center. Appropriate, don't you think? Last year at this time, I downplayed the importance of being the actual #1 company to work for, stating that the "staying power" that
SAS' Tonya Balan answers this question, plus many other basic business analytics questions, right here in the current issue of sascom magazine. It sure helps me, a statistical layman, to talk the talk.
This year the SAS Global Forum group is sponsoring a t-shirt design contest to create the official garb of SAS Global Forum 2010. It sounds like a fun activity, but as a SAS employee I'm not eligible to participate (or more importantly, to win). Still, I can't resist an attempt.
Angela recently posted about how important it is for technical experts to share, not hoard, their information. Late last year I completed a technical review of The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2. Before that I served as reviewer for The Little SAS Book, Fourth Edition (covers SAS 9.2).
Today my colleague Alison Bolen, Editor of sascom magazine, sent me this link to an interesting piece on NPR: "Can Economic Forecasting Predict The Future?" In a somewhat lighthearted take on the inability of our economists to predict the future -- or even precisely report the past for that matter
North Carolina law enforcement officials can now track individual criminal histories using a much more comprehensive collection of data, all managed and accessed via software provided by SAS. According to this recent news article, transitioning from the archaic text-screen-based system to the new web-based interface is "like switching between Pong
Thanks to all of you who tuned in live for my first episode of SAS Talks. If you missed it, don't despair! We recorded it for you and you can watch it any time that you want. Even while I was presenting the talk, we had a panel of SAS
Although I would like to flatter myself and believe that my readers rely solely on The BFD for all their business forecasting news and information, I realize this is not the case. While other sources may not be as honest, useful, or delightfully entertaining to young and old alike, they
2009 is almost over, and us SAS employees are busy compiling information for our managers to answer the question, "Just what did you do this year, anyway?" I'm asking the same question of you, Dear Reader. What did you get from this blog in 2009? Here are the most visited
My most-visited blog post of 2009 discusses how SAS programmers can use SAS Enterprise Guide effectively. Next Thursday (17Dec2009), I'll be discussing this topic live in the next installment of the SAS Talks series. It's a webinar presentation, where you can listen to me talk, watch me demonstrate the software,
The SAS Web Report Studio discussion forum has seen some action lately. Got a question (or some answers)? Don't be shy - join the conversation! Here are a few of the interesting topics: Prompts and Prompts Values How to ask multiple choice questions in your reports. (Hint: the answer is
I'm in the middle of restaging my primary desktop machine at work with Windows 7. It's exciting, but I still have the mundane task of resinstalling all of my essential applications so that I can work again. These apps include things like Notepad++, Chrome, Firefox, Paint.NET and more. Ninite.com offers
Constance Korol oversees the Institute of Business Forecasting & Planning group on LinkedIn. (No, she isn’t the meaner one I will be referring to, but she can swing a nasty rolling pin if you get out of line.) This week Constance posted a Wall Street Journal article “Follow the Tweets,”
I cannot blame SAS customers when they get confused about which SAS products do what. There are a lot of SAS products in play out there, and sometimes their given names don't help the cause. Take SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise Miner, for example. These are two very different
The SAS UK folks have put together a profile of SAS on BigAmbition.co.uk, a site meant to attract young people toward IT careers. The SAS profile includes a nice video that describes SAS as a company and what people can do with our software. While you're looking at videos, be
I’m going to put “An Operational Definition of ‘Demand’ – Part 3” on hold for a moment, to announce a new favorite article on forecasting, “Living in a world of low levels of predictability,” by Spyros Makridakis and Nassim Taleb (International Journal of Forecasting 25 (2009) 840-844. IJF is a
If you're accustomed to using "shell" commands from within your SAS programs (using the X command or SYSTASK statement, for example), you'll find that those statements won't work when you run your program from within SAS Enterprise Guide. When you try them, you will probably see one of the following
In the last post I argued that we don’t have a sure way to measure true (i.e. “unconstrained”) demand. While demand is commonly defined as “what the customer wants, and when they want it,” it is actually a nebulous concept. For a manufacturer, what a customer orders is not the
Sorry about not getting a post out last week, but I spent a good part of it cowering under my desk in fear. The SAS Security office issued a warning that there were wild coyotes roaming the campus, and I was having post-traumatic flashbacks to a painful encounter I once
