How many of you have been given a SAS data set with variables such as Age, Height, and Weight and some or all of them were stored as character values instead of numeric? Probably EVERYONE! Yes, we all know how to do the old "swap and drop" (rename and convert), but
This SAS Jedi is very excited about the SAS 9.4 M4 release, which brought many wonderful gifts just in time for Christmas. So in the interest of extending the Christmas spirit, I'm going to blog about some of my favorites! I've long loved the SAS DO statement variant which allows
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
SAS Programming Professionals, SAS & bugs & rock & roll? But, of course! SAS Because of its amazing versatility, SAS is indisputably the greatest software package currently in use anywhere within the Milky Way Galaxy. Can SAS input every type of flat file imaginable? Yes! Can SAS read and write
Last time I checked, there are well over 500 functions and call routines in SAS. I’ve taught SAS programming courses for 15 years, and I’ll admit that occasionally my students will ask me about a particular function that I have honestly never heard of. I remember the first time this
A reader posed a question in the comments to an earlier Jedi SAS Trick, asking how to write the results of a DS2 DATA _NULL_ program to a text file. It's an interesting question, as DS2 currently has no text file handling statements or capabilities. Take, for example, this traditional
In my previous post, Jedi SAS Tricks - Make This a Button in Base SAS I demonstrated running a SAS program from a tool bar button in the SAS Windowing environment. The program we execute is the macro from a previous post, Jedi SAS Tricks: The DATA to DATA Step
As the excitement of SAS Global Forum begins to die down and we dust off our sequins for another year, it’s time to get back behind the desk. This year at SAS Global Forum we hosted a "Top Tips from Your Favorite SAS Press Authors" lunch where we asked three or four
A recent post, Jedi SAS Tricks: The DATA to DATA Step Macro, engendered a lot of response on Twitter. One of the re-tweets included a call to action - make this a button in Base SAS!
When you’re making a report, how do you choose which procedure to use? The answer is – it depends. It depends on: whether you are doing an ad hoc analysis or creating a final report that many people will see whether you will run statistical tests with your data or
