Before there was CNN or FOX News, people used to get their news from SAS. At least, that's how I imagine that people kept themselves informed. What else can explain the existence of the NEWS= system option, which helps SAS admins to surface the must-know information to the SAS community?
In the immortal words of Britney Spears: Oops! I did it again. At least, I'm afraid that I did. I think I might have helped a SAS student with a homework assignment, or perhaps provided an answer in preparation for a SAS certification exam. Or maybe it was a legitimate
Lots of the visitors to this blog arrive here by way of Google search (welcome!). Thanks to search engines and a few well placed keywords, the same older posts (let's call them "timeless topics") seem to attract the most traffic from year to year. I hope that the searchers find
On the heels of the release of the popular SAS macro variable viewer from last month, I'm providing another custom task that I hope will prove just as useful. This one is a SAS options viewer, similar in concept to the OPTIONS window in SAS display manager. You can download
My daughter's math lessons this year have included the concept of negative numbers (that is, numbers that are less than zero, not numbers that have a bad attitude). She has used number lines such as this one to help her while she completes her homework: Notice that in this number
On his SAS and R blog, Ken K. recently posted an example of a visualization technique called "small multiples". In this exercise, Ken shows the programming technique for replicating a particular series of pie charts in R as well as in SAS. It's a useful exercise to learn from, but
When I was a teenager in the 1980s I purchased my first computer: a TI-99/4A. (Wow, TI's version numbers are more confusing than ours!) I had several friends who had other brands of computers, including the TRS-80 (affectionately known as the "trash 80") and the Commodore 64. Despite our divisions
On this blog, I've delivered a few tips about using SAS formats to stratify your data values "in place" without having to actually change your data. The most recent example addressed date and datetime variables. My previous examples included simple SAS programs that you can run in SAS display manager
Rick posted a tip today about using abbreviations in the SAS program editor window (often referred to as the "enhanced editor"). Defining abbreviations is a great way to save keystrokes and re-use "templates" of code that you've squirreled away. (One of Rick's readers also picked up on the tip, and
I've been working with date-time data on a recent project, and I've come across a few SAS programs that have "opportunity for improvement" when it comes time to create reports. (Or maybe I haven't, and I contrived this entire blog post so that I could reference one of my favorite
