"It's a floor wax, and a dessert topping" - this pretty much describes SAS/Graph! (bonus points if you know where this quote came from!) Some people think of SAS as just a quality control tool. Others think of it as just a sales & marketing tool. And yet others think
Out of all the questions that we asked in our "Ask the statistician" blog and video series at the recent SAS Global Forum, I was most intrigued to hear the responses to this next question: What are the next big trends in statistics? Watch the latest video in the series
What do you get when you put a dozen big data pros around a table to discuss the real (not over-inflated) effects of big data on the organization? An honest discussion around what big data is and what it isn’t, what Hadoop can accomplish and what it cannot. Where did
If breakfast truly is the most important meal of the day then why do so many of us skip it? Often it’s because we feel we don’t have enough time or we just aren’t hungry. However, taking a few quick minutes in the morning to "break the fast" can have
This is the last post in my recent series of articles on computing contours in SAS. Last month a SAS customer asked how to compute the contours of the bivariate normal cumulative distribution function (CDF). Answering that question in a single blog post would have resulted in a long article,
Although she’s an analyst, Anca Tilea estimates that she spends 80% of her time cleaning data. Tilea and co-author Deanna Chyn shared seven of their favorite methods for checking, cleaning and restructuring data. Attendees at MWSUG 2013 got a bonus tip: Ask SAS peers in one of the SAS Support
I’m here at MWSUG 2013 soaking up the regional experience. After spending a couple of days in Columbus, I’m seeing first-hand how much users care about working with SAS software and about being part of the SAS community. It’s been a great conference so far—-presentations are packed! Walking through the
A few weeks back I went shopping for a new car. The experience left me wondering why many dealerships—perhaps the stereotypical small or mid-size US business—were so far behind in use of technology. I was surprised at how little use of tech was in place. At about the same time
When we announced the SAS Global Forum 2013 Best Contributed Paper winners on our blog, the response was huge! I asked the authors to comment on whether or not their paper topics had any broader applications. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Seems like these winning SAS findings are Swiss army
I've written several articles that show how to generate permutations in SAS. In the SAS DATA step, you can use the ALLPEM subroutine to generate all permutations of a DATA step array that contain a small number (18 or fewer) elements. In addition, the PLAN procedure enables you to generate
Your biggest problem with maps used to be learning how to fold a paper road map. Today, with the advent of GPS, Google Maps, and location-specific data, the bar has been raised! ... you now need to know how to plot your data on a map! Below are several examples of different kinds
A couple of weeks back we had a question on how to make a bar chart with stacked and clustered groups. User also wanted to display the value for each stacked segment below the bars. The article Bar Charts with Stacked and Cluster Groups shows how to create such a
Customers continue to validate the value of the joint alliance strategy of Teradata and SAS, and for good reason.
I'm spoiled by the internet. I've grown so accustomed to being able to instantly find an answer to any query—no matter how obscure—that I am surprised when I don't find what I am looking for. The other day I was trying to find a mathematical result: a formula for the
My family are all Lord of the Rings Trilogy fans. As a novice in the world of SAS administration, I find discussing the SAS middle tier architecture a little like traveling through Middle Earth. For me, it’s new and fascinating terrain. And like other travelers, I would find it useful
At SAS, we’ve always been smart about using our own software internally to support our business goals. For an example, read Chris Hemedinger’s post about the SAS program he designed to measure blog activity - and one decision the blog team made as a result. Or, you can read several
Sometimes, your first impulse may not be correct, like trading in your practical sedan for a hot 2-seater. Other times, your first impulse is perfect, as in the examples below. Suppose the automobile data you wish to analyze resides in a CSV file. Naturally, your first impulse is to import
Like many other computer packages, SAS can produce a contour plot that shows the level sets of a function of two variables. For example, I've previously written blogs that use contour plots to visualize the bivariate normal density function and to visualize the cumulative normal distribution function. However, sometimes you
Recently, SAS released SAS Solutions OnDemand for academics. An academic user who is signed up for this can use the SAS Web Editor application to do all their data analysis over the web using a hosted server at SAS. This frees up the user from having to install the software on their own computers,
A couple of years ago I shared a method for copying any file within a SAS program. It was a simple approach, copying the file byte-by-byte from one fileref (SAS file reference) to another. My colleague Bruno Müller, a SAS trainer in Switzerland, has since provided a much more robust
It’s that time of year again. The weather is cooling down and the buzz about the Analytics Conference is heating up. This year’s conference, taking place Oct. 21-22 in Orlando, will bring together more than 1,000 analytics professionals to learn the latest trends, technology and research in the field of
There's an old expression "easy as pie." Have you ever tried to bake a pie??? ... It's not so easy, LOL! And neither is using pie charts correctly! :) Below are several examples of different kinds of pie charts you can create with SAS/GRAPH. And at the bottom of this
John Taylor has been using SAS for about 12 years and admits, he loves SAS! He was first introduced to SAS while working on his BA/MA in Statistics at Boston University. “It became immediately obvious to me that knowing SAS would be invaluable to me as a statistician, so I
SAS 9 has supported calling R from the SAS/IML language since 2009. The interface to R is part of the SAS/IML language. However, there have been so many versions of SAS and R since 2009, that it is hard to remember which SAS release supports which versions of R. The
This week's SAS tip is from Frederick Pratter and his oft-referenced book Web Development with SAS by Example, Third Edition. In case you're counting, I've featured 5 previous excerpts from Frederick's fine book on this blog. There's so much good content to choose from in this big book. After taking a look at this week's
This week I read an interesting blog post that led to a discussion about specifying the frequencies of observations in a regression model. In SAS software, many of the analysis procedures contain a FREQ statement for specifying frequencies and a WEIGHT statement for specifying weights in a weighted regression. Theis
Like many of you teachers out there, I spent a lot of time recently preparing for the new school year. At home, it began with the therapeutic organization of children's rooms. As I sat amid in outgrown clothes, last year’s school work, and books to donate, I braced myself and
One of our readers asked if we could explain some of the thinking behind SAS’ recent decision to modify its support for US regional users groups. Over the past five to ten years, users have been telling SAS they need more targeted, more local and more immediate types of support, especially technical
One of my favorite literary agents, Rachelle Gardner, often talks about the traits of good writers. Recently she posted a list of things that happy authors don’t do. I’ve quoted a few traits from her list that also apply to authors of technical material. Happy authors don’t … 1 …
SAS Data Management is a popular topic here on the SAS interwebs. You can find all types of information ranging from thought leadership to white papers to product details. At SAS Global Forum I sat down with Nancy Rausch, one of the principal R&D managers behind the SAS Data Management
