For the past couple of school terms I've had the privilege to speak to high school students about SAS. I first blogged about this back in March of 2007. The title of my presentation is "The Many Applications of SAS", where "applications" is an overloaded word. We talk about the
The SAS support site has a new example of how to create a Top N report using SAS. The Top N report is pervasive in our society. From the Billboard Top 100 to the New York Times Best Sellers list to the Forbes list of the 100 Richest Americans, the
Yesterday I posted an entry about SAS nerds, but some experts have put it another way: that SAS users are "fanatical" about SAS Business Intelligence solutions. Any way you say it, we've got folks who are passionate about SAS.
Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. - Sarah Vowell I recently read A Short Illustrated History of the Nerd and it got me thinking: am I a SAS nerd? Consider:
40 years ago, my mother was a Computer. No, she was not an ENIAC or UNIVAC or any such room-sized piece of hardware. (Although some of my friends might think that this explains a lot about my personality.) This is my mother we're talking about here! Instead, she assisted aerospace
In this article about next-generation BI, a Forrester analyst cites a few of SAS' strengths and mentions SAS Enterprise Guide specifically: If SAS needs to work on anything, he continues, it's in reducing its dependence on the SAS programming language, which is a requirement to use some advanced features. "With
There are some interesting conversations going on in the SAS discussion forums. Don't be left out: go have your say, today! Prairie dogs are red-green colorblind. They can't tell the difference between ERRORs and WARNINGs in their SAS logs. But this SAS user can. Read: WARNINGS, NOTES...Why the heck did
I read TammiKay's blog post too quickly, and thought for a moment that she was giving away copies of European Vacation, Darwin Awards, and Burning Down the House. It turns out that her blog is not as lowbrow as mine, and she's actually giving away valuable business-related books (the titles
Here at SAS, we eat our own dogfood*. Actually, that's an understatement -- it's better to say that we feast on it. I've been using SAS 9.2 (released earlier this year) and SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 (not yet released) for many months (years, actually) to accomplish several tasks, including to
In my 15 years working for SAS, the company image has evolved quite a bit. I no longer have to explain so much to friends and family when they say "you work for who?" SAS is now well-known as a supplier of business intelligence and analytical solutions, as well as
Having an unusual name can be a blessing and a curse. Fortunately, the "curse" part is mostly behind me now because I'm not in high school ("Hem-Ding! Dinger! Heme-lemma-ding-dong!" ). To borrow from Tigger, the most wonderful thing about "Chris Hemedinger"s is that I'm the only one. (Ha! I'm sure
Since last year, Facebook has opened up the "user profile" to advertisers so that companies can target you with ads that are based on information that you share. One example I've seen of this: a sidebar ad with the headline "Calling all CS majors" -- an ad for some IT
Now that we have support for Vista in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1, this question has bubbled up to the most frequently asked: "Can I use SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 with my new SAS 9.2?" The answer is Yes. You can use SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 with SAS 9.2 for Windows,
You've been asking for it, and now it's here. We have just released a revision to SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 that supports Microsoft Vista. We released SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1 originally in March 2006. Microsoft Vista was on the horizon then, but was not available to the general public until
At SAS Global Forum last week, a customer approached me with a very specific request. The conversation went something like this: Customer: My client demands a bar chart that uses a bar for one response, and a symbol for other responses, all on the same chart. We know it's possible
Alan and Brendan (of Inside SAS Global Forum fame) weren't the only folks with a camera in San Antonio. Featured scenes include: out and about in San Antonio, the technical opening session, the demo room, the Inside SAS Global Forum crew, the kickback party, and student ambassador video blogging.
With the release of SAS 9.2, the SAS documentation that accompanies the software has never been more accessible. See for yourself: check out the product documentation for SAS 9.2. Type in a few keywords in the search pane. I just tried "filename http" -- the top link, describing the FILENAME
Even though it's not a military site these days, apparently the Alamo still sees some action. A colleague and I noticed the helicopters hovering overhead during our lunch break yesterday. Advice to conference attendees: don't leave your pleather conference satchel unattended in a public place, lest the local authorities detonate
Tell an experienced SUGI/SAS Global Forum presenter that you are presenting at SAS Global Forum. One of the first questions he or she will ask you is: "What time is your talk?" Because scheduling matters. Certain time slots have a notoriety of their own. For example, "10:30 Monday" means you
I’ve never found a great user guide, not to say that one doesn’t exist. You should be able to schedule any type of executable/job like a batch file from using the Platform LSF client tools (packaged with the server tools). You can also use command line executables like bsub and
The data table creation date is sometimes necessary, say in the footnote of your stored process. Included below is a sample to retrieve this date from the file system. /*Open the dataset*/ %let dsid=%sysfunc(open(sashelp.shoes)); data _null_; /*grab the CRDTE function*/ ddate=%sysfunc(attrn(&dsid;,CRDTE )); /*Format in DDMONYY*/ call symput('ddate', put(ddate, dtdate9.)); run;
Are you a SAS programmer who does not yet use SAS Enterprise Guide? If so, what are you missing? That's the topic of my SAS Presents paper at SAS Global Forum: Find Out What You're Missing: Programming with SAS Enterprise Guide. From the introduction: More and more SAS programmers are
If you think that baby names and data analysis have nothing to do with one another, then you haven’t read Freakonomics. When my wife and I were expecting our third daughter, we had specific criteria in mind for her name. I used SAS Enterprise Guide and data from the Social
It's only January, and SAS Global Forum 2008 isn't until March, but folks around here have already been preparing for months. For my part, I'm on the hook for two papers: one "invited" (submitted and accepted by the SAS Global Forum committee) and one as a "SAS Presents" (topics that
Information Week released its list of 15 Innovators & Influencers Who Will Make A Difference In 2008. From the article: Meet 15 people who will help shape the business technology world in the coming year. They're not the usual suspects -- the names everyone knows. Several are industry and tech
Even if you don't use Microsoft Office 2007, you might have noticed more ".xlsx" files floating around lately. Perhaps you've been sent one or two that you can't open. XLSX is one of the new Microsoft Excel 2007 file formats. (Others include XLSB and XLSM.) Like many software applications, SAS
Hot off the reel, the SAS for Dummies podcast is now available. Tune in now and hear the juicy tidbits of the story behind the book. Okay, it's no E! True Hollywood Story, but it's as exciting as I get without being on fire. P.S. Shelly Goodin from SAS Press
In a recent Dr. Dobb's Journal piece, Jim Starkey (senior architect for MySQL ) acknowledges that it's time to embed the power of applications within databases, instead of the other way around. Jim says (italics added by me): I think we can agree that context switches or network round trips
Our SAS usage notes usually do a great job of matching symptoms to solutions. But good old SAS note 10751 really stretches the limits of logic. The symptom: a message during the SAS 8.2 setup process that says "string variable is not large enough for string". The solution: "To circumvent
SAS tip-meister Phil Mason shares a veritable cornucopia of tips at the CMG 2007 conference. Check it out, and learn how a healthy diet of flexible DATE formats can keep your Perl expressions regular.
