As a dedicated SAS employee, I take advantage of as many offered perks as I can, and that includes attending the annual SAS Winter Party. My wife and I have not missed one since I started working here, which means that last weekend we attended for the 16th time. Every
If you use SAS for just one purpose, you might be interested to see some of its other uses around your world. This video is also a great link to share with your less-tech-savvy friends/relatives who ask the question: what is SAS and why should I care?
At SAS, our Windows client products (such as SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office) feature hundreds of Windows forms, or dialog windows, implemented with Microsoft .NET. Because we encourage customers to extend our products with their own custom tasks, I wanted to share some tips on how
SAS recently appointed a Social Media Manager for the company. Check out Dave Thomas' recent interview here. The interview question that must have been edited out: "So, why did you decide to leave Wendy's?" Just like SAS ("what's a shoe company got to do with business analytics?"), I imagine that
Today's featured topic on support.sas.com teaches you how to use SAS to work with multiple languages and character sets in a single SAS session. The ability to switch locales and languages "on the fly" depends on the improved support for Unicode within SAS 9.2. Although it's a less heralded component
Today I discovered this thoughtful blog from AnnMaria (I found it by way of her Twitter tweet). I was pleased to see SAS Enterprise Guide in the "wonder" column. Here's the entry: The Dangers and Wonders of Statistics Using SAS.
Jason posted his thoughts on using a netbook with a thin layer of applications to do the stuff that he needs to do: surf the web and work his inbox. But don't underestimate these little machines. Over on the Dell Mini forum there is a discussion among folks who use
Who knew? It turns out that Santa gets more done using SAS. Maybe he even gets his mittens dirty with a little bit of DATA step: data good_kids; set world.allchildren (where=(BEHAVIOR <> "NAUGHTY")); run; title "Nice children"; proc print data=good_kids; run;
You know that game that people play with fortune cookie messages where you add a certain phrase to the end of the message to lend it a whole new meaning? Well, according to this announcement on our SAS support site, you'll be able to play that game with statements about
I'd love to believe that our loyal SAS customers never have to touch a statistical package from another company. Even as I work away in my comfy SAS bubble here in Cary, NC, I occasionally catch wind of stories about SAS customers who need to use data that comes from
From the "how far can we take this metaphor?" department... Want to whet your Thankgiving appetite? Read this blog post from R. L. Burns. The "meat and gravy" section is near the bottom of the post. (Personally, I consider myself the giblets.)
In addition to writing code, SAS R&D developers are very accustomed to writing poems. I don't mean rhyming poetry like sonnets (though we do hear the occasional randy limerick). When a developer wants to make a code change in a SAS product, he or she is required to complete a
I saw an article this morning about the "world's most stupid bug" found in the firmware of a G1 phone. This flaw makes the phone interpret certain keywords in your text messages as system commands (among them: "reboot" to cause a system reboot). It reminds me of that quirky villian
Have you ever glanced through the obituaries and felt stunned to recognize an old friend? That's how it felt when I saw this announcement about Windows 3.11. One of my first assignments when I joined SAS in 1993 was to write Changes and Enhancements to the SAS System Release 6.10:
I see some donors looking at me. At least, that's how I read the last paragraph of this piece about SAS in the local Raleigh newspaper today: WWF, a global conservation group, uses SAS software to determine which potential donors to contact, and how frequently. One recent campaign boosted WWF's
My family and I attended the North Carolina State Fair on Tuesday (weather was beautiful), and noticed two differences from previous years: Everything was more expensive -- getting in, riding the rides, and especially the food. It was easier to get around, because it wasn't so crowded. We didn't have
Recently our support site has raised awareness that SAS Enterprise Guide 2.0 (and related releases 2.05 and 2.1) will "expire" at the end of this year. If we wanted to learn how many customers are still using this release of software, this was an effective way to do it. We've
Like millions of Americans, I watched the vice presidential debate on television last night. I also watched it on Twitter -- which is to say that while watching the debate, I watched the real-time responses of hundreds of Twitter users. Twitter users, as you may know, have up to 140
Despite my evangelization efforts, this is still one of the best kept secrets about SAS Enterprise Guide: you can create your own tasks. (These also work within the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office.) So I'm taking the evangelization to a new level: I've been writing a book on the topic.
I know it's difficult to keep track of all of the lists that feature Jim Goodnight. But I thought it was especially interesting when I saw him on someone's "bucket list". I'm not sure if the list in priority order. Dr. Goodnight falls just below Thomas Friedman, but ahead of
For the past couple of school terms I've had the privilege to speak to high school students about SAS. I first blogged about this back in March of 2007. The title of my presentation is "The Many Applications of SAS", where "applications" is an overloaded word. We talk about the
The SAS support site has a new example of how to create a Top N report using SAS. The Top N report is pervasive in our society. From the Billboard Top 100 to the New York Times Best Sellers list to the Forbes list of the 100 Richest Americans, the
Yesterday I posted an entry about SAS nerds, but some experts have put it another way: that SAS users are "fanatical" about SAS Business Intelligence solutions. Any way you say it, we've got folks who are passionate about SAS.
Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. - Sarah Vowell I recently read A Short Illustrated History of the Nerd and it got me thinking: am I a SAS nerd? Consider:
40 years ago, my mother was a Computer. No, she was not an ENIAC or UNIVAC or any such room-sized piece of hardware. (Although some of my friends might think that this explains a lot about my personality.) This is my mother we're talking about here! Instead, she assisted aerospace
In this article about next-generation BI, a Forrester analyst cites a few of SAS' strengths and mentions SAS Enterprise Guide specifically: If SAS needs to work on anything, he continues, it's in reducing its dependence on the SAS programming language, which is a requirement to use some advanced features. "With
There are some interesting conversations going on in the SAS discussion forums. Don't be left out: go have your say, today! Prairie dogs are red-green colorblind. They can't tell the difference between ERRORs and WARNINGs in their SAS logs. But this SAS user can. Read: WARNINGS, NOTES...Why the heck did
I read TammiKay's blog post too quickly, and thought for a moment that she was giving away copies of European Vacation, Darwin Awards, and Burning Down the House. It turns out that her blog is not as lowbrow as mine, and she's actually giving away valuable business-related books (the titles
Here at SAS, we eat our own dogfood*. Actually, that's an understatement -- it's better to say that we feast on it. I've been using SAS 9.2 (released earlier this year) and SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 (not yet released) for many months (years, actually) to accomplish several tasks, including to
In my 15 years working for SAS, the company image has evolved quite a bit. I no longer have to explain so much to friends and family when they say "you work for who?" SAS is now well-known as a supplier of business intelligence and analytical solutions, as well as
