+Chris Hemedinger is the Director of SAS User Engagement, which includes our SAS Communities and SAS User Groups. Since 1993, Chris has worked for SAS as an author, a software developer, an R&D manager and a consultant. Inexplicably, Chris is still coasting on the limited fame he earned as an author of SAS For Dummies.
TL;DR The next time that you find yourself writing a PROC SORT step, verify that you're working with the SAS Base engine and not a database. If your data is in a database, skip the SORT! The details: When to skip the PROC SORT step Many SAS procedures allow you
When he filmed the scene in the summer of '69, my Dad did not foresee his moment of fame in 2016. But in the last two days, Dad has seen his 47-year-old work appear in the local Buffalo, NY media, on DailyMail.com, and on FOX News*. In August of 1969,
The ODS statement controls most aspects of how SAS creates your output results. You use it to specify the destination type (HTML, PDF, RTF, EXCEL or something else), as well as the details of those destinations: file paths, appearance styles, graphics behaviors, and more. The most common use pattern is
I recently met SAS user "CSC" at the Analytics 2015 conference. It might be generous to say that he's an avid user of SAS Enterprise Guide; it's probably more accurate to say that he's now accustomed to the tool and he's once again productive. But he still misses some features
Rick Wicklin created a nice example of using the SURFACEPLOTPARM statement to create a surface plot in SAS. As I read it, the question that immediately came to mind was: can I use this to create the famous SAS cowboy hat? The "cowboy hat" is a highly distributed example of
Update 02Dec2016: Beginning with SAS 9.4 Maintenance 4, there is now a JSON libname engine. Read this new article to learn more -- you might prefer it to using DS2 for this task! Thanks to the proliferation of cloud services and REST-based APIs, SAS users have been making use of
In my local paper this morning, I read about how a North Carolina state commission plans to recommend changes to our teaching standards for mathematics. One of the topics that they want to bring back: Roman numerals. Why? According to my exhaustive 30 seconds of Internet research, the only practical
While I've often written about how to get your SAS data to Microsoft Excel in some automated way, I haven't really addressed what's probably the most frequently used method: copy and paste. SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 added a nifty little feature that makes copy-and-paste even more useful. The new "Copy
With apologies to this candy advertisement from the 1980s: "Hey, you got your Lua in my SAS program." "You got your SAS code in my Lua program!" Announcer: "PROC LUA: Two great programming languages that program great together!" What is Lua? It's an embeddable scripting language that is often used
I returned to work from a 2+ week vacation this morning. When I fired up SAS Enterprise Guide (as I do each work day and occasionally on weekends), I was greeted with this message: As a SAS insider, I knew this was coming. It's a new feature that was added
