Milestone achieved: I've completed the final chapter of Creating Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide using Microsoft .NET and turned it over to SAS Press for editing and production. It's scheduled to be available in early 2013. I committed to writing this book nearly 5 years ago. I'll engage in
John D. Cook posted a story about Hardy, Ramanujan, and Euler and discusses a conjecture in number theory from 1937. Cook says, Euler discovered 635,318,657 = 158^4 + 59^4 = 134^4 + 133^4 and that this was the smallest [integer]known to be the sum of two fourth powers in two
Next stop on our SAS users’ group road trip – October 14-16 in Research Triangle Park, NC, for the 20th Annual SouthEastern SAS Users Group Conference. Hello! This is my first post to the SAS Users Groups blog and what a fun way to start. Granted, the Triangle doesn’t have
"I want everything!" said a student when I paused to ask my SAS Programming 1 class what else they wanted to learn. Seriously! You want me to share everything I know in three days? The student came back with... "Well okay, what about those freebies you mentioned?" That’s how it all
Congratulations to all of these presenters for having been selected as Best Contributed Paper at WUSS 2012. Make sure you read all of the proceedings - you don't want to miss anything.
Did you know that you can index into SAS/IML matrices by using unique strings that you assign via the MATTRIB statement? The MATTRIB statement associates various attributes to a matrix. Usually, these attributes are only used for printing, but you can also use the ROWNAME= and COLNAME= attributes to subset
During SAS Global Forum 2012, I had conversations with many SAS users who wanted to create Forest Plots. However, there was one new twist. The study names were subgrouped by categories like 'Age', 'Sex', etc., with multiple entries under each subgroup. The name of each study within the subgrouped was indented
I chose this Post-It note this week because it reminded me of a MWSUG paper presentation that I listened to and wrote about. Patricia Hettinger presented "New vs. Old - Under the Hood with PROCs CONTENTS and COMPARE" in the Data Management and Data Mining section. I didn't do it justice in my
A week ago I had the pleasure of attending MWSUG 2012 in Minneapolis. There were many presentations on Data Visualization in various tracks including the following: Using SAS ODS Graphics - Chuck Kincaid Get the best out of SAS ODS Graphics... - LeRoy Bessler Program Assisted Patient Narratives - Faye
Kathy Council and I took at trip to MWSUG, not on the same plane, but at the same time. Kathy was there to talk with you about navigating support.sas.com. I was there to talk with you all and bring back as many blog posts as possible. If you've been following
By now, most of you probably already know how to add drill downs and hover text to your SAS graphs. But did you know you can add pop-up images and graphs? Here are a couple of examples ... In this first example, when you hover your mouse over each state, you
75 degrees, 30% humidity and a cloudless, blue sky: It’s hard to beat Fall in North Carolina! Something else I enjoy this time of year is the colors of Fall, both outdoors and in the kitchen. Many fruits and vegetables are at their peak right now providing amazing, colorful menu
I was recently flipping through Ross' Simulation (2006, 4th Edition) and saw the following exercise: Let N be the minimum number of draws from a uniform distribution [until the sum of the variates]exceeds 1. What is the expected value of N? Write a simulation to estimate the expected value. For
This summer’s education conferences have been dominated by sessions discussing the “next generation,” Common Core aligned assessments in English and mathematics. As 44 states plan for the transition from their state tests to the new PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium assessments, SAS has received repeated questions from our partners
If you remember Andy Kuligowski for nothing else, you probably remember that he was the SAS Global Forum conference chair for 2012. I remember that he has a wonderful sense of humor, which he used more than once during his Hands on Workshop at the MidWest SAS Users Group conference
The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book: Creating Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide using Microsoft .NET. If your custom task generates a SAS program, the chances are pretty high that your program will reference one or more variables within a SAS data set. Despite our best efforts,
You may recall that I am a novice SAS user - I've been using SAS for about two years now and work for Canada's largest pediatric hospital as a database administrator and data analyst. In April, during SAS Global Forum 2012, I wrote my first blog post on the SAS Users
Sometimes it is useful to group observations based on the values of some variable. Common schemes for grouping include binning and using quantiles. In the binning approach, a variable is divided into k equal intervals, called bins, and each observation is assigned to a bin. In this scheme, the size
Diane Olson, from SAS, wrote a SAS Global Forum paper in 2011 that seems ready-made for this SAS user's Post-It note. Olson wrote about PROC COPY and PROC APPEND. In her paper, she lets you in on the inside tricks on how to clone your data set to the same library, copy
Detecting and preventing fraud isn't easy. Many tools and techniques are required, and while the digital age and advanced technologies have made fraud much easier in many ways, those same technologies have opened up new ways to combat it. One of those comes in the form of social network analysis,
Chris Hemedinger is not the only person who’s excited about the capabilities of SAS Enterprise Guide. Tom Miron, from Systems Seminar Consultants, a SAS author with more than 35 years of SAS experience, shared some great advice for using SAS Enterprise Guide.
Dear Miss SAS Answers, I have read through a few Dear Miss SAS Answers blog posts, but I cannot seem to find what I am looking for. I need to extract only the second duplicate from a whole list of duplicates per account number. Is there a way to
There are five short, simple, quick rules to help you take advantage of indexes. An index lets you retrieve information from SAS data sets or tables. And according to Kirk Paul Lafler, if you keep these rules in mind, your information retrieval will be more efficient. Lafler is the Senior
With the US presidential election looming, all eyes are on the Electoral College. In the presidential election, each state gets as many votes in the Electoral College as it has representatives in both congressional houses. (The District of Columbia also gets three electors.) Because every state has two senators, it
Last week I attended a meeting of the Toronto Area SAS Society. (Okay, I didn't just attend; I was a presenter as well.) This user group meeting contained a feature that I had never seen before: "Solutions to the Posed Problem". Weeks before the meeting, an "open problem" was posted
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
