+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.
I've seen some crazy process flows in SAS Enterprise Guide. Crazy-big, and crazy-complex, used by real customers to accomplish real work. But while these process flows represent a ton of work, this is usually a calculated investment to automate processes that would be difficult to capture in another way. For
If you have not yet discovered the new Ask the Expert series on the SAS Training site, you are missing out on a treasure. Visit the site right now and review all of the available topics, from "Newbie" to Analytics to Visualization to good ol' SAS programming. Go on; I'll
The XLSX libname engine in SAS allows you to read and write Microsoft Excel files in the same way that you can work with other data sets and databases. This article describes the basic (and some limitations) of the XLSX engine.
Are you a VIEWTABLE fan from the SAS Windowing Environment (a.k.a. Display Manager, DMS, PC SAS)? If so, the latest version of SAS Enterprise Guide has a new feature that you'll love. With the latest update to SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 (7.11), you can now subset your data in the
I've written about how to use the FILENAME ZIP method to read and update ZIP files in your SAS programs. The ZIP method was added in SAS 9.4, and its advantage is that you can accomplish more in SAS without having to launch external utilities such as WinZip, gunzip, or
I watched with wonder as each of my daughters learned how to "tell time." Early in their primary school careers, they brought home worksheets that featured clock faces with big-hand/little-hand configurations that they had to decipher, and exercises that asked them to draw the hands as they should appear given
Copy/paste is my favorite method for creating new SAS programs. In my work projects, I maintain a sort of genealogy of SAS programs, because the DNA of one program can be used to spawn many other SAS programs as its progeny. When things (inevitably) aren't working as I intend in
Two popular SAS custom tasks have recently been updated for SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1. Most custom tasks that I've shared will work without modification across releases, but these two required a special rebuild due to some internal product API changes. The Project Reviewer task allows you to see a detail
To develop a custom task for use in SAS Enterprise Guide (or SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office), you need a few things: A working knowledge of SAS and SAS Enterprise Guide Microsoft Visual Studio (the free Express edition will do, though the Professional edition is better) Some experience with C#
Back in the day when the prison system forced inmates to perform "hard labor", folks would say (of someone in prison): "He's busy making little ones out of big ones." This evokes the cliché image of inmates who are chained together, forced to swing a chisel to break large rocks
