The DO Loop

Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Rick WicklinFebruary 27, 2017 7

Point/Counterpoint: Should a programming language accept misspelled keywords?

Longtime SAS programmers know that the SAS DATA step and SAS procedures are very tolerant of typographical errors. You can misspell most keywords and SAS will "guess" what you mean. For example, if you mistype "PROC" as "PRC," SAS will run the program but write a warning to the log:

English

Programming Tips

Rick WicklinFebruary 6, 2017 1

What colors does PROC SGPLOT use for markers?

Suppose you create a scatter plot in SAS with PROC SGPLOT. What color does PROC SGPLOT use for the markers? If you specify the GROUP= option so that markers are colored by a grouping variable, what colors are used to represent the various groups? The following scatter plot shows the

English

Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJanuary 23, 2017 2

Five reasons to check out the new SAS analytical documentation

The SAS analytical documentation has a new look. Beginning with the 14.2 release of the SAS analytical products (which shipped with SAS 9.4m4 in November 2016), the HTML version of the online documentation has moved to a new framework called the Help Center. The URL for the online documentation is

English

Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJanuary 16, 2017 5

PUT it there! Six tips for using PUT and %PUT statements in SAS

For SAS programmers, the PUT statement in the DATA step and the %PUT macro statement are useful statements that enable you to display the values of variables and macro variables, respectively. By default, the output appears in the SAS log. This article shares a few tips that help you to

English

Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJanuary 11, 2017 1

Ten posts from 2016 that deserve a second look

Last week I wrote about the 10 most popular articles from The DO Loop in 2016. The popular articles tend to be about elementary topics that appeal to a wide range of SAS programmers. Today I present an "editor's choice" list of technical articles that describe more advanced statistical methods

English

Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJanuary 9, 2017 14

ODS OUTPUT: Store any statistic created by any SAS procedure

In the beginning, SAS created procedures and output. The output was formless and void. Then SAS said, "Let there be ODS," and there was ODS. Customers saw that ODS was good, and SAS separated the computation from the display and management of output. The preceding paragraph oversimplifies the SAS Output

English

Programming Tips

Rick WicklinJanuary 4, 2017 2

The top 10 posts from The DO Loop in 2016

I wrote 105 posts for The DO Loop blog in 2016. My most popular articles were about data analysis, SAS programming tips, and elementary statistics. Without further ado, here are the most popular articles from 2016. Data Analysis and Visualization Start with a juicy set of data and an interesting

English

Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinOctober 5, 2015 39

How to generate random integers in SAS

You can use SAS to generate random integers between 1–10 or in the range 1–100. This article shows how to generate random integers as easily as Excel does. I was recently talking with some SAS customers and I was asked "Why can't SAS create an easy way to generate random

English

Advanced Analytics | Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Compute minimum and maximum of rows and columns in SAS

Rick WicklinDecember 1, 2014 16

Compute maximum and minimum values for rows and columns in SAS

A common question on SAS discussion forums is how to compute the minimum and maximum values across several variables. It is easy to compute statistics across rows by using the DATA step. This article shows how to compute the minimum and maximum values for each observation (across variables) and, for

English

Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinNovember 3, 2014 0

Recent additions to the SAS/IML file-sharing community

It has been three months since the introduction of the SAS/IML File Exchange, so I thought I'd give a short update on recent submissions and activity. (Note: The File Exchange was merged into the SAS Community Library in 2022.) Users have submitted eight new articles. The application areas include experimental

English

Blogs

Blogs

Programming Tips