Last week I attended my first SCSUG conference, this one in Houston.  Houston, the fourth most populous city in USA, is the world's capitol of the Oil and Gas industry.  So it was no surprise I met many attendees from local oil and gas related companies.  But, I also met many from the pharmaceutical and CRO companies.

The attendance was over 200 enthusiastic users, with most using the SAS 9.2 release and many using SAS 9.3 release.  Awareness of the new ODS Graphics features and procedures was very high.

I presented the following Seminars, Papers and Super Demos:

• Now you can Annotate your SG Procedure Graphs - Dan Heath.
• Quick Results with SAS ODS Graphics Designer - Super Demo.
• New SAS 9.3 Features for SG Procedures - Super Demo.
• Clinical Graphs using SG Procedures - half-day seminar as a 4 hour paper.

A popular and useful feature for SAS 9.3 SGPLOT is cluster groups for all plots, including bar charts, box plots, scatter plots and more.  Here is an example of a box plot with cluster groups on a scaled interval x-axis:

All the above presentations attracted large attendance, as many users were already using SG Procedures and GTL, and were eager to find out more about these.  This was evident from the following excellent papers that included usage of SG Procedures and GTL:

• Nesting Multiple Box Plots and Block plots using GTL and Lattice - Stanek 
• Picture Perfect Graphing with Statistical Graphics Procedures - VanBurkirk
• MULTI-PANEL SCATTER PLOTS AND SCATTER PLOT MATRICES  - Kulesz
• Overlaying Scatter Plots on Box Plots in the Presence of Ties - Minard
• SAS ODS and ODS Graphics for z/OS - Welch

"Overlaying Scatter Plots..." paper included an interesting technique to overlay jittered scatter markers on a box plot:

Next week is NESUG 2012 in Baltimore.  Prashant Hebbar, Warren Kuhfeld are presenting papers related to ODS Graphics.  Maura Stokes and Cynthia Zender are also present.  Be sure to catch them at the conference.