My favorite SAS tips and tools from 2012

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!