I am passionate about teaching. My colleagues would probably say this is the understatement of the year. And it likely has something to do with the fact that both of my parents were teachers. I started my teaching career at the university level and after many years an unexpected opportunity
SASuser power! Does this phrase conjure up any images for you? I visualize SAS users across the globe, addressing messy data, combating fraud, and making use of business analytics to provide insight and add business value for organizations around the world. We, SASusers are powerful! With the Potential of One
Sometimes it is useful in the SAS/IML language to convert a character string into a vector of one-character values. For example, you might want to count the frequency distribution of characters, which is easy when each character is an element of a vector. The question of how to convert a
This week's SAS tip is from Kevin D. Smith and his new book PROC TEMPLATE Made Easy: A Guide for SAS Users. Kevin is a software developer at SAS with extensive experience supporting PROC TEMPLATE and underlying ODS technologies. We're excited that Kevin decided to write his book and hope
Fall is rolling around, which means time to plan and attend at least SAS regional conferences. I’m heading to the Southeastern SAS User’s Group (SESUG) conference in beautiful St. Petersburg, Florida. While I do love the conference, they had me at St. Pete Beach!
Do you know (right off the top of your head) the simple SAS/GRAPH code you would use to create line graphs? ... If not, then this tutorial is for you! A line plot is basically a scatter plot where the markers are connected. A line plot should only be used
With the popularity of SAS Grid Manager, this question often comes up: which clustered or shared file system should we use with the multiple nodes of the SAS Grid? This is a question that needs to be thought through very carefully because the amount of time and effort to fix
Ways We Excrete Toxins You learned in the previous Chews Strategically post, Foods for Natural Detox, that certain foods provide important nutrients that assist the liver in transforming toxins so they can be excreted from the body. After the toxins are transformed into water soluble substances they are excreted through
Finding the maximum value of a function is an important task in statistics. There are three approaches to finding a maxima: When the function is available as an analytic expression, you can use an optimization algorithm to find the maxima. For example, in the SAS/IML language, you can use any
Scatter plots are probably the simplest kind of graph, and provide a great way to visually look for relationships between two variables. But, do you know (right off the top of your head) the simple SAS/GRAPH code you would use to create them? ... This tutorial leads you step-by-step through the
With registration for the Midwest SAS Users Group well underway, I reached out to conference chair George Hurley to get the scoop on what makes MWSUG a can’t-miss event for SAS users. As a veteran MWSUG attendee, he’s an absolute expert in what makes it such a rewarding opportunity for
Recently I wrote about how to determine the age of your SAS release. Experienced SAS programmers know that you can programatically determine information about your SAS release by using certain automatic macro variables that SAS provides: SYSVER: contains the major and minor version of the SAS release SYSVLONG: contains the
Recently my boss came across a graph where a time series plot was modified to include a "thickness" response. We wondered if this would be a good addition to the GTL / SG Series plot statement. What would the result look like, and what are the pros and cons? So, I took up
Over the past few releases, SAS has offered high availability for servers through various failover techniques. So I’ve been wondering how metadata clustering differs and why does SAS 9.4 provide it. The “why” is an easy question to answer. Today’s SAS software is used in a wide array of business-critical applications
A common visualization is to compare characteristics of two groups. This article emphasizes two tips that will help make the comparison clear. First, consider graphing the differences between the groups. Second, in any plot that has a categorical axis, sort the categories by a meaningful quantity. This article is motivated
SAS 9.4 was released a month ago, and we are excited about all the new features in SG Procedures, GTL and Designer. I wrote an article on SAS 9.4 graph features last month, and promised more to come. What then could be better than this Tech Talk video hosted by our
Remember being young and bursting with anticipation of the next show and tell? You knew you had something really amazing to share, and you wanted your classmates to see or hear it. Get ready for that same feeling of excitement and anticipation. Because it’s back. On a much bigger, global
Even the best programmers make mistakes. For most errors, SAS software displays the nature and location of the error, returns control to the programmer, and awaits further instructions. However, there are a handful of insidious errors that cause SAS to think that a statement or program is not finished. For
I'm happy to announce the SAS Data Management support community has a new look and feel! And there’s lots of additional content and resources now too. The SAS Data Management community on support.sas.com is a central hub for anyone interested in SAS data access, integration, quality and governance. Community Manager
In SAS 9.4, the SAS programming language continues add new features by the truckload. I've already discussed PROC DELETE (which is actually an old feature, but like an 80s hit song it's now back with a better version). In this SAS Tech Talk video from SAS Global Forum 2013, I
What do you do all day long? I spend my time speaking with customers about what’s new in SAS 9.4, answering technical questions, and showing new users what they can do in SAS. You might spend your time on SAS data management tasks such as bringing in data and joining
The words "Detox" or "Detoxification" get thrown around a lot these days but few people know what these words really mean. Detoxification in reference to human health refers to your body’s ability to convert, or biotransform, waste products and toxins into non-toxic substances that can be excreted from the body.
Earlier this week I posted a "guest blog" in which my 8th grade son described a visualization of data for the 2013 ASA Poster Competition. The purpose of today's blog post is to present a higher-level statistical analysis of the same data. I will use a t test and a
As the NorthEast SAS Users Group (NESUG) approaches, I sat down with NESUG volunteer and Executive Committee member Sue Douglass to discuss all the features of this year’s conference and why SAS users can’t wait to register. This year, they’re offering over 125 papers, expanded preconference training sessions and perennial
As student growth or value-added measures become more prevalent in educator evaluation systems, many question how those ratings actually help teachers improve their practice. i.e. “How does a level 3 teacher become a level 4 or 5?” Robust and reliable value-added data serve as a great starting point for teachers
Editor's Note: My 8th grade son, David, created a poster that he submitted to the 2013 ASA Poster Competition. The competition encourages students to display "two or more related graphics that summarize a set of data, look at the data from different points of view, and answer specific questions about
The graphs produced by the SG procedures (and GTL) have a default look and feel designed for the common use cases. However, everyone has a preference for some special features that make the graphs unique. Fortunately, extensive customizations can be made to graphs produced by these tools using statement and
John Taylor likes computer data the way he likes big trout: here, there or anywhere. Which is perfectly natural, considering he’s the data analyst in the Inland Fisheries Department at Texas Parks and Wildlife. Taylor describes his unspoiled enthusiasm for big data and big fish in this sendup of Dr. Seuss that
If you're a software developer, you're probably already familiar with these terms: I18N and L10N. Internationalization (I + 18 letters + N = I18N) The discipline of preparing your software to run correctly in different languages with different culture settings. For example, the software must be able to accommodate multibyte
An updated version of the SAS Hot Fix Analysis, Download and Deployment Tool (SASHFADD) has just been released on the SAS Technical Support Hot Fix site. If you are not familiar with SASHFADD (pronounced SAS-H-F-ADD), it’s a tool that will analyze a SAS 9.2, SAS 9.3 or SAS 9.4 deployment
