17 days ago, I posted Olympic inspiration for marketers and in it I shared a few good lessons for marketers from the Games. With a long-term focus, discipline, results orientation and teamwork, all sorts of victories are possible - for both athletes and marketers. Those same lessons have been validated
Sometimes a small option can make a big difference. Last week I thought to myself, "I wish there were an option that prevents variable labels from appearing in a table or graph." Well, it turns out that there is! I was using PROC MEANS to display some summary statistics, and
A weekly ritual at our house is to pore over the local Sunday newspaper print edition and drink big mugs of strong coffee. My wife and I take different sections, we discuss various items that strike us along the way, and we can often have the world's problems solved by noon. It's very
Forest plots come in many flavors. An example of a Forest plot using GTL is available on the SAS support web site. Simple forest plots can also be created using SGPLOT procedure by using the SCATTER statement with MARKERCHAR to display data aligned with the plot by study names. One issue
This final post in the series on how marketing solutions will fill a role in the organization of the future focuses on the idea of pervasive positive impact. Previously, we've examimed the first two elements of customer intelligence (CI) or integrated marketing management (IMM) solutions that will serve you well into the future - profitability and
Do you use SAS for analytics and Microsoft Excel for graphs? Why not use SAS for your graphs too?!? Then you could completely automate the entire process in one SAS program, with no manual steps! A lot of people use Excel to create their graphs because "it's what they know." What if somebody
This Post-It Note reminds me of a presentation at SAS Global Forum 2012 about automating reports. Of course, these Post-It Notes always remind me of presentations. This week, instead of pointing you to a bunch of past presentations, I'm going to challenge you to use this note as an idea
Unbelievable: It's already August. When I was a child, my mother used to talk about how time flies when you become an adult, and that I shouldn't wish my life away by always wanting to be older than my years or longing for something that was just beyond my maturity
I've seen analyses of Fisher's iris data so often that sometimes I feel like I can smell the flowers' scent. However, yesterday I stumbled upon an analysis that I hadn't seen before. The typical analysis is shown in the documentation for the CANDISC procedure in the SAS/STAT documentation. A (canonical)
This is the third in a series of four posts that focus on how marketing solutions can help marketing fulfill its role in the organization. In the first post, I outlined the three specific functions for the solutions to fulfill - to drive profitability, to increase productivity, and to be
With limited time and budget, you can still thoroughly test SAS reports built in SAS BI Dashboard and SAS Web Report Studio by considering how all the tools were used to build the end report. An understanding of the functionality within each part of the chain from raw data to
Okay - not exactly Hollywood – but it’s only 30 minutes away – so you could visit during the evening or stay the weekend after the conference to do some star-sightings. Long Beach is outside of Los Angeles and close to Hollywood! It’s not too late to sign up for the WUSS (Western
When the Western Users of SAS Software gather in Long Beach, CA this September, I'll be proud to be counted among the WUSSers. (You can learn more about WUSS here; don't look here.) The WUSS organizers must have some serious clout, because the line-up of presenters reads like a "Who's
Everyone in the world has their attention turned towards the Olympics this week, so what better topic to tie in to a SAS/GRAPH blog than that?!?! I had seen a graph on the guardian website that I thought was interesting, so I decided to try to create my own (slightly different)
A comment to last week's article on "How to get data values out of ODS graphics" indicated that the technique would be useful for changing the title on an ODS graph "without messing around with GTL." You can certainly use the technique for that purpose, but if you want to
In this Innovation Inspiration, a SAS user has developed the insurance rating plans for a country using predictive modeling. How exciting! Additionally, the system adjusts based upon actual experience. This is quite the accomplishment given the complexity of the ratemaking for even a small geographical territory. The comments section reveal the identity of this innovator. Check it out.
This is the second in a series of four posts that focus on how marketing solutions can help marketing fulfill lits role in the organization. In the first post, I outlined the three specific functions for the solutions to fulfill, being to drive profitability, to increase productivity, and to be pervasive. This
In the Clinical Research domain, there is often the need to display lab values by treatment or test and it is often useful to view this data along with reference lines showing the normal ranges. The obvious way is to use reference lines to denote the normal ranges. SGPLOT Code: proc sgplot data=band; scatter x=x y=y
Many SAS procedures can produce ODS statistical graphics as naturally as they produce tables. Did you know that it is possible to obtain the numbers underlying an ODS statistical graph? This post shows how. Suppose that a SAS procedure creates a graph that displays a curve and that you want
My sleep patterns are erratic (and somewhat torturous) – they range from sleeping solidly for eight hours a clip to me wandering aimlessly about the house at 3am. Unfortunately, the latter was the reality during the wee hours of Friday, July 20; I was up watching ESPN (my typical late
Hopefully you know that a gif animation can be used for more than just showing a cartoon animal doing cute tricks! Being a savvy data-meister, I'm sure you are also aware that you can use gif animations to see how data changes over time. But perhaps you didn't know you could
If you need to calculate the mean, sum, standard deviation, or frequency count for a variable, you'll find it pretty easy to accomplish in SAS Enterprise Guide. The corresponding tasks in the menus have names like "Summary Statistics" or "One-way Frequencies". Obvious, right? Often, researchers or students have a quest
I received the following question: In the DATA step I always use the ** operator to raise a values to a power, like this: x**2. But on your blog I you use the ## operator to raise values to a power in SAS/IML programs. Does SAS/IML not support the **
The opening ceremonies for the 2012 summer Olympic Games in London, England are about to start and I could not be more thrilled. The Olympics are the pinnacle in the world of sports and the opening ceremonies are a phenomenal opportunity for people all over the world to burst with pride as
Fire department operations are very complex, with multi-faceted missions that include not only fire prevention and suppression, but emergency response and fire inspections. These must be coordinated with area growth and development decisions, and water system management decisions. When a fire or an emergency occurs, the right equipment, with the right people,
When working with "big data" you usually have too many points to view in a plot, and end up subsetting or summarizing the data. But now, in SAS 9.3, you have an alternative! For example, the following scatter plot of 10,000+ points is just a visual "blob": But using a new
Last week I wrote an article in which I pointed out that many SAS programmers write a simulation in SAS by writing a macro loop. This approach is extremely inefficient, so I presented a more efficient technique. Not only is the macro loop approach slow, but there are other undesirable
Thanks to Illumino, the citizens of Datapolis are still able to get their medicine and Frackture is being kept at bay; however we both have our hands full and a new crisis is on the horizon. Our data scientists and engineers have informed me that a new evil force is
Poster presentations are a great opportunity to present in a less formal, less stressful format than the full session, but the poster presentation still gives you a great opportunity for professional feedback and a chance to go to a great conference. Well, good news! You still have time to submit
When comparing results by category and group, putting the items to be compared close together usually leads to a graph that is easier to decode. Take the case of the data (simulated) shown below. Here we have population by age group and sex. To compare the population by sex, it is
