Do you have many points in your scatter plots that overlap each other? If so, your graph exhibits overplotting. Overplotting occurs when many points have similar coordinates. For example, the following scatter plot (which is produced by using the ODS statistical graphics procedure, SGPLOT) displays 12,000 points, many of which
Contributed by SAS Publishing’s Shelly Goodin I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I just learned yesterday that World Book Day is TODAY, March 3. So I visited the World Book Day Website to find out more. Our book loving friends in Ireland and the United Kingdom apparently launched this
SAS Global Forum creates a big buzz in the SAS user community, so in order to find out what the fuss is about, I decided to chat with a couple of our instructors who would be going to Las Vegas. In addition to teaching pre-conference training, these two instructors will
The ODS Graphics Designer allows you to design and build your own statistical graphs in SAS, without having to learn how to program in the new graph template language (GTL). The ODS Graphics Designer is a rich user interface that allows you to design these graphs based upon your own
I don't use the SAS macro language very often. Because the SAS/IML language has statements for looping and evaluating expressions, I rarely write a macro function as part of a SAS/IML programs. Oh, sure, I use the %LET statement to define global constants, but I seldom use the %DO and
I have read maybe thousands of books over the past few decades. From classics to business books to young adult novels to some genres that shall indefinitely remain unnamed... And while I loathed some of these books, I can't really call any of them "bad." There is an audience for
A few months ago I wrote a blog entry titled "SAS/GRAPH "SG" Procedures--Not Just for Statisticians!" It was so well received that I was invited to open for Celine Dion at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas! Well, not really, but I was invited (along with co-blogger Cynthia Zender) to give
If you haven't signed up for SAS Global Forum 2011 in Las Vegas, you'd better get moving: February 28 is the last day for early registration and the discounted hotel prices. You should also sign up for the pre-conference statistical tutorials, which are filling up fast! I was tempted to
Contributed by Rick Wicklin, author of Statistical Programming with SAS/IML Software This year at SAS Global Forum 2011, I am presenting a statistical tutorial, "Data Simulation for Evaluating Statistical Methods in SAS". In this course, I show how to create data with known properties (such as skewed or heavy-tailed) and
As we discussed last week, the forecasting process is often contaminated by individuals whose input makes the forecast worse. Sometimes this is intentional. For example, if I'm tired of hearing customers complain about out-of-stocks on retail shelves, I'll try to drive up the forecast so that more inventory will be
Before you take off for SAS Global Forum in Las Vegas, take a trip to our training page to hear Aubrey Barfield interview SAS instructor Andy Ravenna about the event. He’ll talk about his session, Becoming a Better Programmer with SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3, which he will be presenting at
In 9.2, OLAP Cubes can be updated incrementally. This is awesome, as you then don't have to worry about users locking your cube by closing the Web Report Studio window or leaving their EG session running. However, at the same time, this can cause the size of space an OLAP
I was inspired by Chris Hemedinger's blog posts about his daughter's science fair project. Explaining statistics to a pre-teenager can be a humbling experience. My 11-year-old son likes science. He recently set about trying to measure which of three projectile launchers is the most accurate. I think he wanted to
Last year I had the pleasure of working with SAS Executive Advisor for Retail Lori Schafer and retail veteran and former Montgomery Ward CEO Bernie Brennan on their new book, Branded! How Retailers Engage Consumers with Social Media and Mobility. The book presents eight case studies of retailers that are
I’m sure you will all agree that a programmer’s favorite task is to maximize efficiency thus enhancing performance. Dear reader, in this blog post I’ll share my best programming practices so that you can benefit from what I typically show my students in class. At the end I’d like to
In DI Studio 4.3, SAS offers a code importer utility that can assist with moving legacy SAS code into an enterprise DI environment. The importer uses PROC SCAPROC to analyze and translate the code into DI Studio components. There is also a neat utility to bring in code comments and
I don't know much about the SQL procedure, but I know that it is powerful. According to the SAS documentation for the SQL procedure, "PROC SQL can perform some of the operations that are provided by the DATA step and the PRINT, SORT, and SUMMARY procedures." Recently, a fellow blogger,
Recently, I read Dr. AnnMaria De Mars' blog post "Translating Ruby to SAS (or vice versa)." I found that I really liked it, and not just because she mentions me (although that was pretty cool). But rather, I like the end of the post, where she identifies a key value
Contributed by Chris Hemedinger, coauthor of SAS for Dummies, Second Edition, the genius behind The SAS Dummy blog, and the moderator of the SAS Enterprise Guide discussion forum. The SAS log is your source for information if you want to know the following: What SAS did while running your program
When upgrading from an existing 4.2 client install of SAS Add-in to MS Office, you are not prompted to enable the Outlook portion of the Add-in. As SAS points out in the KB Post http://support.sas.com/kb/40/272.html, there is a 'Switcher Utility' available in the client install. When running this, I would
If you are a statistical programmer, sooner or later you have to compute a confidence interval. In the SAS/IML language, some beginning programmers struggle with forming a confidence interval. I don't mean that they struggle with the statistics (they know how to compute the relevant quantities), I mean that they
A recurring theme of The Business Forecasting Deal (both this blog and the book) is that forecasting is a huge waste of management time. This doesn't mean that forecasting is pointless, irrelevant, or entirely useless in running our organizations. It only means that the amount of time, money, and human
The Flowing Data blog posted some data about how much TV actors get paid per episode. About a dozen folks have created various visualizations of the data (see the comments in the Flowing Data blog), several of them very glitzy and fancy. One variable in the data is a categorical
Contributed by SAS Publishing's Julie M. Platt, Mary Beth Steinbach, Shelly Goodin, and Sandy Varner Wednesday, February 16 Julie M. Platt TOC ended with a series of presentations that focused in how to get content noticed. In thinking about our authors, their content, and our users, my key takeaways today
I've known several people who were raised during the Great Depression, and I've observed that they are very mindful of waste. My wife's grandmother used to save plastic bags, twist ties, and relatively clean aluminum foil for potential reuse in the household -- because such materials were once scarce. The
I've written about this topic before, but find that more people are interested in how this works. Hoping to provide more detail below. Let me know if I missed anything! When using the 'GEO' dimension type in SAS OLAP Cubes, users will not see anything new unless the OLAP cube
Contributed by SAS Publishing's Sandy Varner, Julie M. Platt, Mary Beth Steinbach, and Shelly Goodin Tuesday, February 15 Sandy Varner Being at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference allows me to step away from the day-to-day work at SAS Publishing and take the 20,000 foot perspective of the publishing industry.
Suppose that you want to create a matrix in SAS/IML software that has a special structure, such as a tridiagonal matrix. How do you do it? Or suppose that you want to find elements of a matrix A such that A[i,j] satisfies a certain condition. How do you get the
Contributed by Mary Beth Steinbach, SAS Press Managing Editor and Shelly Goodin Yesterday four of us from SAS Publishing flew into NY for the 2011 Tools of Change Conference (TOC). For the next two days we'll blog about our experience and striking book trends. (Plus, you can watch TOC keynote
Brian Whittington mentioned last month that government is innovating, and at great speed. Based on what I’ve seen in our line of work with state and local governments around the country in the past year, I have to agree. In the face of today’s daunting fiscal challenges, state and local
