Author

Dan Heath
RSS
Principal Systems Developer

Dan Heath is a principal systems developer at SAS Institute. A SAS user for more than 28 years, Dan specializes in SAS/GRAPH software, ODS Graphics, and related graphing technologies. Dan has been a speaker at a number of regional and local users' group meetings, including SAS Global Forum, PharmaSUG, and WUSS. He received a BS degree in computer science from North Carolina State University.

Data Visualization
Dan Heath 9
Roses are red, violets are blue...

This classic start to a romantic poem assumes that the correct colors are always assigned to the correct flowers; but, for those who create graphs for reports, consistent color assignment can be more of a challenge than an assumption. This challenge is particularly true for the display of group values.

Data Visualization
Dan Heath 0
A (tool)tip for band plots

Recently, I had a discussion with a user concerning the volume of imagemap data generated for an interactive,  web-based visual contain a large number of graphs. The large amount of imagemap data was causing problems with the current version of their web browser. The graphs consisted of either bar charts

Data Visualization
Dan Heath 6
They go where you put them

An issue that SAS/GRAPH users have wrestled with in the past has been how to put tick marks at irregular intervals on their axes. In PROC GPLOT, if you specify irregular intervals using the ORDER option on the AXIS statement, the procedure’s axis kicks into a “discrete” mode, where the

Data Visualization
Dan Heath 12
The Power of Unicode

The Unicode character table contains a vast array of  characters and symbols that can be quite useful for making your text more descriptive in your graph. These characters can be inserted into any viewable string that you can define in the GTL or SG procedure syntax. These strings include titles,