This article demonstrates a SAS programming technique that I call Kuhfeld's template modification technique. The technique enables you to dynamically modify an ODS template and immediately call the modified template to produce a new graph or table. By following the five steps in this article, you can implement the technique
In a large simulation study, it can be convenient to have a "control file" that contains the parameters for the study. My recent article about how to simulate multivariate normal clusters demonstrates a simple example of this technique. The simulation in that article uses an input data set that contains
In last week's article about the Flint water crisis, I computed the 90th percentile of a small data set. Although I didn't mention it, the value that I reported is different from the the 90th percentile that is reported in Significance magazine. That is not unusual. The data only had
Last week I showed a timeline of living US presidents. The number of living presidents is constant during the time interval between inaugurations and deaths of presidents. The data was taken from a Wikipedia table (shown below) that shows the number of years and days between events. This article shows
Did you know that you can check a SAS macro variable to see if ODS graphics is enabled? The other day I wanted to write a SAS program that creates a graph only if ODS graphics is enabled. The solution is to check the SYSODSGRAPHICS macro variable, which is automatically
SAS formats are very useful and can be used in a myriad of creative ways. For example, you can use formats to display decimal values as a fraction. However, SAS supports so many formats that it is difficult to remember details about the format syntax, such as the default field
SAS programmers who have experience with other programming languages sometimes wonder whether the SAS language supports statements that are equivalent to the "break" and "continue" statements in other languages. The answer is yes. The LEAVE statement in the SAS DATA step is equivalent to the "break" statement. It provides a
I recently needed to solve a fun programming problem. I challenge other SAS programmers to solve it, too! The problem is easy to state: Given a long sequence of digits, can you write a program to count how many times a particular subsequence occurs? For example, if I give you
Suppose you have several discrete variables. You want to conduct a frequency analysis of these variables and print the results, but ONLY for variables that have three or more levels. In other words, you want to conditionally display some results, but you don't know which variables satisfy the condition until
After reading my article about how to use BY-group processing to run 1000 regression models, a SAS programmer asked whether it is possible to reorder the output of a BY-group analysis. The answer is yes: you can use the DOCUMENT procedure to replay a portion of your output in any
