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.
In the first Star Wars movie, Obi-wan uses Jedi mind tricks to convince the stormtroopers that the droids they see are not the droids they're looking for. A colleague at SAS passed along a question from a SAS user where the column labels they were seeing were NOT the labels
I'll be at SAS Global Forum again this year. I do SO love SAS Global Forum and the opportunity to talk DATA step, SQL, Macro and DS2 programming with other SAS aficionados! I’d love to connect with you, so send me an email or a tweet (@SASJedi) or just stop
I've been a busy Jedi the last few months and have spent the bulk of my non-teaching days learning new Jedi SAS tricks to share with you. The finishing touches are going on to our brand-new, one and a half day DS2 Programming: Essentials class. It's rolling out on December 16
May 4 is celebrated by some folks as "Star Wars Day". Of course, this makes a SAS Jedi wonder "What is the SAS date of the next Star Wars Day"? Not being one to do things by hand, I'd rather program to find the answer. For this, I'll use the
Somewhere between RDU and SFO I realized that the tickle and cough I'd had the last couple of days wasn't really a reaction to the heavy pollen in the air in Cary, and instead was something a little more powerful. The good news is that I managed to keep my
It's hard to believe I'm heading out to SAS Global Forum for the first time as a SAS employee! Before coming to SAS, I had attended the SAS Users Group International annual conventions for several years running, and had even presented a couple of papers there. I remember the feeling
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a world where two suns set over the horizon instead of just one. The planet, called Kepler-16b, is the most "Tatooine-like" planet yet found in our galaxy." While catching up on my reading, this article from NASA's Kepler project fired my imagination! At last, perhaps,
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
In the previous episode, we built our own custom SAS function - a masterful trick indeed. Gordon Keener, a developer here at SAS, responded exuberantly "You think that's cool? - try THIS!" and proceeded to demonstrate prodigious powers with the SAS by using a custom function in a custom informat
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
