Mark Jordan (a.k.a. SAS Jedi) grew up in northeast Brazil as the son of Baptist missionaries. After 20 years as a US Navy submariner pursuing his passion for programming as a hobby, in 1994 he retired, turned his hobby into a dream job, and has been a SAS programmer ever since. Mark writes and teaches a broad spectrum of SAS programming classes, and his book, "Mastering the SAS® DS2 Procedure: Advanced Data Wrangling Techniques" is in its second edition. When he isn’t writing, teaching, or posting “Jedi SAS Tricks”, Mark enjoys playing with his grand and great-grandchildren, hanging out at the beach, and reading science fiction novels. His secret obsession is flying toys – kites, rockets, drones – and though he usually tries to convince Lori that they are for the grandkids, she isn't buying it. Mark lives in historic Williamsburg, VA with his wife, Lori, and Stella, their cat. To connect with Mark, check out his SAS Press Author page, follow him on Twitter @SASJedi or connect on Facebook or LinkedIn.
One of my students emailed me, asking how to easily reset SAS system options. He was looking for a one-liner solution, just like you get with graphic options: GOPTIONS RESET; While there isn't a RESET keyword for the OPTIONS statement, you can save your options settings before making changes using
A SAS user (who lives in the the US) emailed me a question about SAS functions. He was reading UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) datetime values from server logs, and to make future calculations and comparisons easier, he wanted to transform the value to local datetime. The INTNX() function worked great, but
In the Star Wars movie, Obi-wan could just wave his hand, mutter a few words, and the stormtroopers would "move along". How the power of the Force makes ridding yourself of problematic characters so much easier! I recently was invited to become an alternate instructor for Ron Cody’s SAS Business
If you’ve taken one of my SAS classes you may recall “Mark’s 3 rules of programming”, the first of which is “Lazy programmers are GOOD programmers.” One of the things I love about best about SAS programming is the plethora of functions and shortcuts built into the language, all designed
James Bond: “Give me the old fashioned target range, Quartermaster. “ Q: “Yes, well, it's called the future, so get used to it.” In James Bond movies, it's Q's job to disguise wickedly effective technology as seemingly innocuous everyday objects. The power of those seemingly everyday objects, revealed at just
In my last blog post, I discussed how to use SAS options to send unattended email using an SMTP server. In this segment, I’ll tackle creating “pretty” email (using HTML) and sending out emails with attachments. First, I produced a basic report using ODS. I liked the look, and set
I’m responsible for a SAS program that runs nightly in batch on a Linux server here at SAS. I am also a road warrior, and routine status checking via a remote connection is often tricky, and sometimes impossible due to unstable hotel internet connections. So I thought “Why can’t SAS just
I was building a nice little PDF report the other day. I love the way ODS PDF replicates the SAS Results window navigation structure as PDF bookmarks, but... I'd much rather write the text for the bookmarks myself. So, I decided to "use the SAS" and make ODS do my
