Even with more than 45,000 global customer sites, I often hear SAS users say that “SAS” is a small world. Perhaps conferences enhance the feeling: From the moment you get in line to get your conference materials, you start to recognize people from your SAS “family.” An attendee also described
I’ve spent quite a while now going through chapter 8, “Creating Enhanced List and Summary Reports,” in the Base Certification Prep Guide. This topic should be straightforward, I keep telling myself. So why did I score 40% on the quiz? Thinking that I probably needed to delve a little deeper,
Day one of the 2010 CFO Corporate Performance Management Conference in New York is in the books, and while the day’s presentations and discussions should rightly merit being the prime subjects of this post, those events have been overshadowed by one of even greater magnitude: dinner with Thornton May. Where
Andy wrote in the NOTE: blog that he's stumbled upon a few custom tasks to extend features in SAS Enterprise Guide. He wondered aloud whether there might be more "free" tasks out there, available for use by anyone who can find them and download them. The answer is: You betcha!*
~ Contributed by I-kong Fu ~ AnalyticsCamp is an unconference started by Nathan Gilliatt after a group of us met at a networking meeting in Raleigh last year called Web Analytics Wednesday. The first AnalyticsCamp will take place at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill on Saturday, February 6th,
In case you missed the business news last week, SAS (the company that pays me to write this blog, and the leader in business analytics) was named #1 on the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For 2010 list. Having been a user (and huge fan) of SAS software since
Subtitle: An accounting of accounts which, by all accounts, you should hold accountable. With the introduction of the SAS metadata server for use with SAS Business Intelligence, the role of the SAS administrator became more important. In SAS 9.1.3 a number of new standard "accounts" -- user IDs that serve
Back in December I wrote about the t-shirt contest on sasCommunity.org. Meanwhile, awards season kicked into high gear with the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards - just to name a few. Now it’s time for the first annual Best SAS t-shirt Award Show, and it’s
Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it. -Rene Descartes A great quote to apply to many things in life, including this path towards certification. Realizing that I needed a review, I enrolled in a three day, onsite Programming I class here in
This sign greeted me as I was driving into work this morning for a routine appointment at our onsite health care center. Appropriate, don't you think? Last year at this time, I downplayed the importance of being the actual #1 company to work for, stating that the "staying power" that
“The ability to predict future business trends with reasonable accuracy will be one of the crucial competitive advantages of this new decade," SAS CEO Jim Goodnight told students, faculty and business partners at a Jan. 15 Villanova University School of Business event. “And you won’t be able to do that
I hate shopping. Going to the local mall is a form of torture for me. But send me to a virtual store, and I’ll happily browse online and likely place an order. Now I can do the same thing, of sorts, with SAS Global Forum since the presentation schedules and
SAS' Tonya Balan answers this question, plus many other basic business analytics questions, right here in the current issue of sascom magazine. It sure helps me, a statistical layman, to talk the talk.
This year the SAS Global Forum group is sponsoring a t-shirt design contest to create the official garb of SAS Global Forum 2010. It sounds like a fun activity, but as a SAS employee I'm not eligible to participate (or more importantly, to win). Still, I can't resist an attempt.
Angela recently posted about how important it is for technical experts to share, not hoard, their information. Late last year I completed a technical review of The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2. Before that I served as reviewer for The Little SAS Book, Fourth Edition (covers SAS 9.2).
Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and a very happy 2010 so far. We’re lucky enough to work for a company that closes between Christmas and New Years’, so it was an extra long break for all of us here at SAS. Along with almost
Today my colleague Alison Bolen, Editor of sascom magazine, sent me this link to an interesting piece on NPR: "Can Economic Forecasting Predict The Future?" In a somewhat lighthearted take on the inability of our economists to predict the future -- or even precisely report the past for that matter
North Carolina law enforcement officials can now track individual criminal histories using a much more comprehensive collection of data, all managed and accessed via software provided by SAS. According to this recent news article, transitioning from the archaic text-screen-based system to the new web-based interface is "like switching between Pong
We watched our favorite holiday movie last weekend: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Most who know me would be surprised to read that I start sobbing at about the time that Mr. Gower buys George his—alas, unused—around-the-world suitcase and don’t stop until (spoiler alert!) Clarence gets his wings. One
As the year comes to a close, you have no doubt seen by our many book promotions how busy all of us in SAS Press have been this year. For me personally, it has been a very productive and gratifying year to see three of my book projects become a
Thanks to all of you who tuned in live for my first episode of SAS Talks. If you missed it, don't despair! We recorded it for you and you can watch it any time that you want. Even while I was presenting the talk, we had a panel of SAS
Although I would like to flatter myself and believe that my readers rely solely on The BFD for all their business forecasting news and information, I realize this is not the case. While other sources may not be as honest, useful, or delightfully entertaining to young and old alike, they
2009 is almost over, and us SAS employees are busy compiling information for our managers to answer the question, "Just what did you do this year, anyway?" I'm asking the same question of you, Dear Reader. What did you get from this blog in 2009? Here are the most visited
There is an ancient t-shirt that I have from my first users group conference. It dates from 1995, and it shows a cat holding a floppy disk and the words WUSS (for Western Users of SAS Software) on it. Never mind that I can’t fit into it anymore; Nor can
My most-visited blog post of 2009 discusses how SAS programmers can use SAS Enterprise Guide effectively. Next Thursday (17Dec2009), I'll be discussing this topic live in the next installment of the SAS Talks series. It's a webinar presentation, where you can listen to me talk, watch me demonstrate the software,
The SAS Web Report Studio discussion forum has seen some action lately. Got a question (or some answers)? Don't be shy - join the conversation! Here are a few of the interesting topics: Prompts and Prompts Values How to ask multiple choice questions in your reports. (Hint: the answer is
I'm in the middle of restaging my primary desktop machine at work with Windows 7. It's exciting, but I still have the mundane task of resinstalling all of my essential applications so that I can work again. These apps include things like Notepad++, Chrome, Firefox, Paint.NET and more. Ninite.com offers
Constance Korol oversees the Institute of Business Forecasting & Planning group on LinkedIn. (No, she isn’t the meaner one I will be referring to, but she can swing a nasty rolling pin if you get out of line.) This week Constance posted a Wall Street Journal article “Follow the Tweets,”
I cannot blame SAS customers when they get confused about which SAS products do what. There are a lot of SAS products in play out there, and sometimes their given names don't help the cause. Take SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise Miner, for example. These are two very different
The SAS UK folks have put together a profile of SAS on BigAmbition.co.uk, a site meant to attract young people toward IT careers. The SAS profile includes a nice video that describes SAS as a company and what people can do with our software. While you're looking at videos, be
