The SAS Dummy

Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMarch 27, 2008 7

Fancy charts with simple code in SAS 9.2 using SGPLOT

At SAS Global Forum last week, a customer approached me with a very specific request. The conversation went something like this: Customer: My client demands a bar chart that uses a bar for one response, and a symbol for other responses, all on the same chart. We know it's possible

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMarch 3, 2008 1

SAS programmers are welcome here!

Are you a SAS programmer who does not yet use SAS Enterprise Guide? If so, what are you missing? That's the topic of my SAS Presents paper at SAS Global Forum: Find Out What You're Missing: Programming with SAS Enterprise Guide. From the introduction: More and more SAS programmers are

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJanuary 17, 2008 0

The road to San Antonio

It's only January, and SAS Global Forum 2008 isn't until March, but folks around here have already been preparing for months. For my part, I'm on the hook for two papers: one "invited" (submitted and accepted by the SAS Global Forum committee) and one as a "SAS Presents" (topics that

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerDecember 14, 2007 4

Using SAS Enterprise Guide to read Microsoft Office 2007 files

Even if you don't use Microsoft Office 2007, you might have noticed more ".xlsx" files floating around lately. Perhaps you've been sent one or two that you can't open. XLSX is one of the new Microsoft Excel 2007 file formats. (Others include XLSB and XLSM.) Like many software applications, SAS

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerNovember 20, 2007 11

Lengths and formats: the long and short of it

A reader from Bejing commented on a recent post with a question about data lengths and formats. While that wasn't really related to my post, I thought I'd attempt to answer in a new entry, here. The question is basically this: when I combine two data sets with a common-named

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 29, 2007 3

SAS 9 Tips O Plenty

SAS tip-meister Phil Mason shares a veritable cornucopia of tips at the CMG 2007 conference. Check it out, and learn how a healthy diet of flexible DATE formats can keep your Perl expressions regular.

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 5, 2007 34

You are under my command (prompt)

In his blog, Jared details the hoops one must jump through to convince SAS to run system shell commands (such as the X command and SYSTASK) from SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is the explanation: SAS Enterprise Guide is a client application, and SAS runs as a server application. When launched

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 28, 2007 0

How can you calculate someone's age?

"Cut him in half and count the number of rings?" Some folks on the discussion forum share a better method to calculate someone's age from SAS Enterprise Guide.

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 27, 2007 4

They all look the same to me: SAS.EXEs are everywhere

If you deploy the SAS 9 environment on Windows, you may have multiple SAS processes running on a single box (metadata process, OLAP server, multiple workspace servers). Windows Task Manager doesn't provide a great way to distinguish one sas.exe process from another, but Process Explorer does. Process Explorer lets you

English

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 19, 2007 10

fuente de la juventud (font of youth)

My new favorite typeface for programming is Consolas, a font designed for use with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I use it there, but I now also use it for SAS programming. It uses ClearType technology, so the "crisp and clean" benefits kick in only when you have ClearType smoothing enabled.

English

Blogs

Blogs

Programming Tips