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
I’m going to put “An Operational Definition of ‘Demand’ – Part 3” on hold for a moment, to announce a new favorite article on forecasting, “Living in a world of low levels of predictability,” by Spyros Makridakis and Nassim Taleb (International Journal of Forecasting 25 (2009) 840-844. IJF is a
If you're accustomed to using "shell" commands from within your SAS programs (using the X command or SYSTASK statement, for example), you'll find that those statements won't work when you run your program from within SAS Enterprise Guide. When you try them, you will probably see one of the following
In the last post I argued that we don’t have a sure way to measure true (i.e. “unconstrained”) demand. While demand is commonly defined as “what the customer wants, and when they want it,” it is actually a nebulous concept. For a manufacturer, what a customer orders is not the
Sorry about not getting a post out last week, but I spent a good part of it cowering under my desk in fear. The SAS Security office issued a warning that there were wild coyotes roaming the campus, and I was having post-traumatic flashbacks to a painful encounter I once
I’m excited to announce that SAS Press will have two more new books available for sale soon! Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond by Lauren Haworth, Cynthia Zender, and Michele Burlew, and Combining and Modifying SAS Data Sets: Examples, Second Edition by Michele Burlew will be available November 16th.
It is definitely easier to force single selections for prompts used in SAS Stored Processes, however it isn't very usable when the majority of users need to select multiple values. For example, let us say we create a prompt for region (called 'region_prompt') and then use that in the query
If you want to save money when you register for SAS Global Forum 2010, check out the two new package offers. Both offers bundle popular registration options at a discount. Not only will they save you money, these special packages may also help you with getting conference approval. It’s an
The SAS Business Intelligence suite includes the ability to map data via the ESRI Map Service within various web clients (and even Enterprise Guide). Steps: Create an ESRI Map via ArcMap Publish to ArcGIS Server via ArcCatalog Define a New Map Service in SAS Management Console Set a cube dimension as
If you've read this blog before, then you already know about the ODS statistical graphics that are available in SAS 9.2. We've been talking about this innovation at SAS for years. Now it's time to spread the news. Do your colleagues a favor: forward this post to them, or at
I've just returned from the Los Angeles Basin SAS Users Group (LABSUG), where I both presented a talk and learned from others. (The meeting was in Pasadena, but I did get a chance to tour the area, as you can see from my picture.) The title of my talk was
The North Carolina State Fair just closed. This year’s theme was a “A Whole Lotta Happy” and drew in a record-breaking 900,000 people. Whether you go there for the rides or the games or the exhibits or the animals or the giant pumpkins or the latest fried concoction, the State
Have you seen the new SAS Add-in to MS Office? There are new features worth pointing out & hopefully this will help convince you that now is the time to switch! In SAS Management Console, three built in security roles have been estabilished to accurately assign functionality per user or group.
Yesterday at The Premier Business Leadership Series, I had the tremendous pleasure of attending the panel debate Balancing Intuition and Analytics in Decision Making. The panelists were: Malcolm Gladwell - Best-selling author of Outliers: The Story of Success, Blink and The Tipping Point; Tom Davenport - Best-selling author of Competing
Decision management expert James Taylor wins the prize for most prolific blogger from The Series. James gives us thorough summaries of great presentations on: Balancing Intuition and Analytics in Decision Making. Analytics & Innovation, Analytics in the Executive Suite. SAS Media Day customer panels on fraud detection. and optimization. By
Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers and Blink, and Tom Davenport, Babson College professor and author of Competing on Analytics, engaged this morning in a debate on a live Webcast onsite at The Premier Business Leadership Series at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. The theme of the debate is analytics vs. instinct:
Tuesday was a great day at M2009. I was able to talk to SAS Press author Randy Collica, who is working on a new edition of CRM Segmentation and Clustering Using SAS Enterprise Miner. I interviewed him and Curt Hinrichs, another SAS Press author, who is a coauthor of the
Last week I was a guest of Gaurav Verma on the SAS Applying Business Analytics Web Series, and presented “What Management Must Know About Forecasting.” One of the most important things you can bring to management’s attention is the benefit of making your demand forecastable. In forecasting we tend to
With local data highlighted in Microsoft Excel, you can then "Copy to SAS Server" to run SAS analytical tasks. The menu bar ('SAS' -> 'Active Data' -> 'Copy to SAS Server') is also the image below: SAS provides a knowledge base entry at: http://support.sas.com/kb/32/009.html to show how this can be done with a
Yesterday I attended a virtual talk by Bob Rodriguez on his famous topic: ODS Statistical Graphics in SAS 9.2. You can learn lots of details by reading his paper. Bob's paper shows examples of the graphs you can get, how to control their appearance, and what SAS syntax to use.
The route that I use from my home in Raleigh to the SAS Cary headquarters takes me by two exits for the now-running NC State Fair. Last year’s total attendance was 765,067, and hopes are high that this year’s 142nd fair will be another success. So what does the State
Bulk editing of multiple data elements An example of this is when you have 10 items that are numerical and therefore are set to allow measures, but should be classified as categorical (such as serial numbers and ids), you can select all of these values, now you can in one
