SAS Support Communities provide a forum in which to engage and share with your fellow SAS experts, now in over 20 topic areas including Forecasting and Econometrics. This is the go-to website for your hard core modeling questions, such as "Holdouts in PROC ARIMA," "2-stage Heckman (1979) procedure," and the perennially popular "Moving average forecast."

My colleague Ken Sanford just announced a new "tip of the week" series for SAS forecasting and econometrics users on the Communities page. Ken provided a tip on controlling your output in the SAS Output Delivery System (ODS).

This week Bobby Gutierrez of the SAS/ETS development team provided a tip on Fixed vs. Random Effects in Panel Data.

If you get the idea that SAS software can help you build just about any kind of model you want, with data as big as you can get, you are correct.

But if you don't have the time, inclination, or skill set to create your own custom models, let the software do it for you. SAS Forecast Server provides large-scale automatic forecasting, and can combine with SAS Grid Manager to spread the workload and handle the biggest forecast challenges. (See how Wyndham Exchange & Rentals utilizes grid computing to generate 1.4 billion forecasts.)

For businesses operating on a more modest scale, SAS Forecasting for Desktop provides a cost-effective entry point to automatic forecasting.

Here is a 5-minute demonstration of the user interface shared by Forecast Server and Forecasting for Desktop.

If you are already a SAS forecasting or econometrics user, you are encouraged to join the community, post your questions, and share your expertise. And if you aren't already a SAS user, come see what you've been missing.