As technology expands, we have a similarly increasing need to create programs that can be handed off – to clients, to regulatory agencies, to parent companies, or to other projects – and handed off with little or no modification needed by the recipient. Minimizing modification by the recipient often requires
My river walk last week turned into a spectacular fall show. But if it rains this week in San Antonio, like the weatherman predicts, what will I do? In the coming days, I’ll be presenting at two user groups, one in eastern Canada in Halifax, and the other all the
The one thing, above all others, that I wish PROC REPORT could do is know which observations from my data set that I want kept together on a single page of non-Listing output. This is problematic for two reasons. 1. PROC REPORT cannot read my mind! 2. PROC REPORT does
Our new book, Exercises and Projects for The Little SAS® Book Fifth Edition, includes a variety of exercises to help people learn SAS programming. Rebecca Ottesen, Lora Delwiche and I designed this book so that it can be used either in a classroom setting or by individual readers working alone.
When reading a text file (common extensions: TXT, DAT; or, for the adventurous: HTML) with the DATA STEP, you should always view several lines from the text file, and compare to the record layout, before completing the INPUT statement. There are many ways to view a text file. I use
Dataset too big for PROC PRINT? One weird trick solves your problem! proc print data=bigdata (obs=10); run; The OBS= dataset option specifies the last observation to process from an input dataset. In the above example, regardless of dataset size, only the first 10 observations are printed; an easy way to
Many of our authors often ask us where they can find real data that they can use without copyright or other confidentiality issues. Instructors too are always on the look-out for real-life data. Well, thanks to a new initiative supported by SAS, you can now access data from more than
New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg made a new-year's resolution to learn code. Apple’s Steve Jobs said, “I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.” President Barrack Obama said, "Don't just buy a new video game, make one.
I am all about sharing. Knock on my door and I will gladly lend you a stick of margarine, a cup of sugar, an egg or two, some flour, a corkscrew, or a beer. Not a problem to borrow a tie, one of my extra belts, a white shirt (if
So, how did you first learn SAS programming? Originally, I was self-taught. Many years ago, I learned SAS on the job when a systems programmer quit and I took over supporting a mainframe performance software package that was written in SAS. I got a copy of the Base SAS users
