Are you just starting out in your career? What if you think you’ve been around the block and there is nothing new you can do in your career? Everyone has their own perspective on what career planning is, but Bill Donovan from OckhamSource has a plan to help SAS users make a career
Every fall (fall in the US, that is), I try to attend as many SAS Users Groups events as humanly possible. This year, I’m starting with the MidWest SAS Users Groups conference in Minneapolis, then SouthEast SAS Users Group conference in Durham, NC (my home base) and finishing the season
Your SAS user experience matters to me and to everyone at SAS. That’s the reason we continue to build customer-focused programs. We want learn as much as possible about your experience: How do you interact with us? With which departments do you interact most, and what successes and challenges do
Avast Mateys! Did you know that International Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up?!? (September 19) Here's the official website, if you'd like more info. And what better way to get into the spirit of things than to use SAS/GRAPH to plot some real pirate data - Arrrr!!! Here's
“It’s the age of the search engine! I remember people ‘Yahoo!’ing during the late 90's and ‘Google’ing till the late 2k's and now ‘Bing’ing. I just wondered, ‘Why not SAS?’” wrote Pramod. R on his blog SASopedia. This was the beginning of a quest and a MidWest SAS Users Groups
There are times when programmers need to know the source of the data sets used in a program. This macro, designed by Prasanna Murugesan and Sushant Thakare from Quintiles Inc., will help you extract the lib names from various programs and put them in an Excel file.
So, here we are – back to our normal routines of school, work is in full-swing, and the Toronto Area Users Group (TASS) starts up again. I really wish everything else started off this fall as well as TASS did – talk about an exceptional group of presenters, talks and people!
Who says anyone is an expert at something? I definitely do not when it comes to SAS (well, anything for that matter). Each time I sit through a presentation at a conference I learn something new. During the SAS Western Users Conference, fondly know as WUSS, this month I learned
If you use a word three times, it's yours. -Unknown When I was a child, my mother used to encourage me to increase my vocabulary by saying, "If you use a word three times, it's yours for life." I believe that the same saying holds for programming techniques: Use a
A week ago, SAS "wusses" got together in Long Beach, California for another successful WUSS conference. Personally, I really enjoy all SAS user conferences as it gives me an opportunity to see the creative ways in which SAS users are exploiting our software. One such case was the paper "Power
I know that for every SAS user event there are many people who aren't able to attend or who have to choose between two or more great sessions. So a couple of days ago, I started a discussion on several SAS users LinkedIn groups asking those of you who are attending SAS Users Groups
Government pensions at the state and local government level have come under attack in recent years over their viability. Much of this attack has been political and is being used to go after unions and pensioners who tend to support one party or another. State and local governments work hard to maintain viable
Collecting data quickly and efficiently is a focus for businesses regardless of their size. For small and mid-sized businesses, successfully managing data without being a burden on an understaffed and overworked IT department can be an added challenge. Plus, there is the added responsibility of making sure ACCURATE data is
Out of the box, the simple bar graph uses the same color for each bar. A frequent request from users is to define a standard color palette for the dashboard indicators so distinct bars are the same color in each indicator or from refresh to refresh. With most dashboard tricks,
Last time on our road trip, I headed out West for the WUSS Conference in Long Beach, California. Now, I’m going North — to the Midwest, to be precise! Minneapolis, Minnesota is the home of this year’s Midwest SAS Users Group (MWSUG) Conference and the next stop on our virtual
This article is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Simulating Data with SAS. Not every matrix with 1 on the diagonal and off-diagonal elements in the range [–1, 1] is a valid correlation matrix. A correlation matrix has a special property known as positive semidefiniteness. All correlation matrices are positive
I remarked in an earlier post (“BI and Better Decisions”) that, prior to joining SAS, while I understood analytics and performance management just fine, the phrase ‘business intelligence’ was not in my vocabulary”. Turns out I’m not the only finance professional so inflicted. I was invited last week to give a
After weeks of anticipation, one of fall’s best offerings, Football Season, is here! Hot diggity!!! Now many sports fans view this as a total positive, but those who have been working hard all summer to shave percentage points off their body fat and boost their fitness levels recognize football season’s
This is a dramatic interpretation of an actual conversation I recently had with the CIO of one of North Carolina’s leading cities. We discussed his experience using data quality, data integration, business intelligence and analytics in the daily operation of the city. I may have taken some...well, a lot of
Robert Allison posted a map that shows the average commute times for major US cities, along with the proportion of the commute that is attributed to traffic jams and other congestion. The data are from a CEOs for Cities report (Driven Apart, 2010, p. 45). Robert use SAS/GRAPH software to
Last week in my post, Revenue Management vs. Price Optimization: Part One, I explored the practice of practice of hospitality revenue management, its origins in the airlines and how it was changed for use in the hospitality industry. This week I will explore how price optimization has evolved and how
A while back, I had seen the following map on the CEOs for Cities website. It seemed like an interesting topic and an interesting map, but I just couldn't grok what their map was saying ... So I decided to download the data and create my own map with SAS. I
Ah! The joys of sets! It is easy to test whether two vectors are equal in SAS/IML software. It is only slightly more challenging to test whether two sets are equal. Recall that A and B are equal as sets if they contain the same elements. Order does not matter.
As summer comes to an end, I find myself getting excited about some of the regional user group conferences that take place every fall. This year, I’ll be presenting a paper at WUSS (Western Users of SAS Software) in Long Beach, CA, in early September. About one week later, I’m
Ever since the term "big data" has popped up as a hot topic, you may have also heard about this "new" role called the data scientist. This is an important role that helps derive insight out of any sized data by applying knowledge about analytics to help solve business problems. I would argue that
Planning for SAS Global Forum 2013 is well underway and it’s time you get involved through the Call for Papers! As the 2013 SAS Global Forum conference chair, I cannot emphasize enough how much we rely on your creative tips and tricks to contribute to the invaluable content provided at
I needed to construct a string to use in the title of a scatter plot. The scatter plot showed a line, and I wanted to include the equation of the line in the plot's title. This article shows how to construct a string that contains the equation in a readable
A few weeks ago I wrote an article on using the non breaking space character to prevent stripping of leading and trailing blanks in a string. Since then, I have discovered a few more instances where the nbsp can be a useful tool for creating graphs. One such instance came up last week
It’s that time of year again! The leaves are turning, the days are getting shorter, and all across the country, SAS users are getting ready for the annual users group conferences. To get people excited about the upcoming events, I’ll be hitting the road—metaphorically, at least—and virtually visiting each of
One of the often-cited side effects of moving from "Base SAS" (SAS on your PC, or Display Manager) to SAS Enterprise Guide is the loss of "X" command privileges -- that is, the ability for your SAS programs to invoke other programs via the operating system shell. We call this
