Many of my blogging colleagues are taking this week to reflect on their top posts in 2012. Some are using the visitor statistics to rank the posts, but as Andy Ratcliffe points out, that gives short-shrift to the late-season articles.
This year, I'm going to use this space to recap a few of my favorite topics, grouped by theme. These are the topics that generated lots of interest, or perhaps they haven't yet generated the interest that I think they deserve -- so I'll plug them again.
New tools to improve your SAS Enterprise Guide life
I'll lead with my favorites - new custom tasks! They are easy to download, install, and use. Some of these might be The Missing Feature that you're looking for, so it's worth your time to check them out.
- Copy Files task (for FTP-like file transfers). It supports wildcard notation and macro expressions, providing lots of flexibility.
- Project Reviewer task - shows all of the tasks in your project, grouped by process flow. It summarizes the time elapsed by each task and each process flow, who last modified the tasks and when, and more. And you can automatically include this as a report within your project.
- SAS Options Viewer - a SAS Enterprise Guide version of the OPTIONS window, showing the current values for all of your SAS system options.
- SAS Macro Variable Viewer - a window to view all of your SAS macro variables. Also includes a tool to evaluate macro expressions instantly.
- Search your project files with the EGP-Project-Search-inator.
64-bit SAS and 64-bit Windows
Many people are now using 64-bit versions of Windows, and they've updated their SAS installation to a 64-bit version to go with it. Was it all smooth sailing? Not quite -- here are the top 64-bit "gotchas".
Also see these related posts:
- Myths about 64-bit computing on Windows
- Are 64-bit client applications twice as good as 32-bit applications?
- How do I export from SAS to Excel files: Let me count the ways
Fun for tinkerers: Windows PowerShell
I had a lot of fun playing with Windows PowerShell this year and figuring out how to integrate it with SAS. Here are a few of my favorite posts on the topic:
- Build your own SAS data set viewer using PowerShell
- Using Windows PowerShell to report on your SAS Enterprise Guide project files
- and the basics: Running Windows PowerShell Scripts
Cool SAS programming tips
In my job I write and maintain lots of SAS programs, so I'm always finding new ways to do things. That's a great thing about SAS: it's so huge that you can never know everything about it, so you'll always have something new to learn. Here are a few of the tips that I learned and/or shared over the past year:
- Implement BY processing for your entire SAS program
- Using SAS to access data stored on Dropbox (or GitHub or Google Drive)
- Using source control management with SAS Enterprise Guide
- Understanding precision in SAS numbers
With my new book completed and available, I hope to have time to learn and share even more in 2013. I've already got a couple of SAS Global Forum papers lined up; those are sure to provide me with some material very soon!
2 Comments
Hi Chris,
Could you please suggest more specifics on how to open and execute an existing SAS code with SAS EG using Powershell. Unfortunately, there is a lot of information available on vbscript but not on Powershell(only source seems to be your blog). Also, I know the metadata server configuration(which is required to setup profile in SAS EG) but, how to identify the workspace configuration ?
Thanks
Nikk, check out the resources on this sasCommunity page. You might also be able to adapt some of the VBScript examples to PowerShell. If necessary, I'll see if I can come up with a small simple PowerShell example that connects to the SAS environment using the EG metadata profile, and submits a program. Would that help?