In hopes of adding to your SAS Global Forum experience, we've kicked off a SAS presenters series. Here, we’ve asked some of the SAS presenters five questions to learn more about what makes them tick, why they chose to present and what they hoped you would take away from the presentation. Take a look at I-kong Fu’s answers.

I-kong Fu, Global Product Manager

I-kong Fu, tell me something about yourself that our readers might not expect.
On occasion, I enjoy trying to make homemade pizzas, and I believe that relates to my SAS Global Forum paper. For toppings and ingredients, off the top of my head, I start with high gluten flour (it lets you make a thinner crust with more air bubbles that still holds up to the weight of the ingredients). A little corn meal keeps it from sticking on the pan - sometimes I use a pizza stone because it transfers more heat. If I’m making more than one pizza, which is usually the case, I'll alternate between the stone and an aluminum pan. I have not bought a pizza peel (one of those large wooden spatulas), but plan to.

For toppings, it varies a lot depending on what we have in the house and what everyone likes. Most of my family likes fresh mozzarella, but one of my kids is allergic to dairy so his pizza has no cheese. My older child loves eggplant and pepperoni, and my wife loves to load up her pizza with fresh veggies. I pretty much like all of the above. Just talking about this, I feel like making pizza now.

Have you been to SAS Global Forum before? If so, what was your most memorable experience so far?
I’ve been to SAS Global Forum four times (including when the conference was called "SUGI"). I don't have a specific best memory. I enjoy meeting everyone to talk about SAS and also having a chance to walk around the area if the conference is in a large city.

What problem or customer pain were you hoping to solve with Ad Hoc Data Preparation for Analysis Using SAS® Enterprise Guide®?
My paper covers a few examples of ad hoc data preparation using SAS Enterprise Guide. Analysts will often comment how much time they spend preparing data: that it takes more time than their actual analyses. To me, that is similar to making a pizza: The value is in the final result, but most of the time is spent on the preparatory work. I try to show how a few different preparation tasks can be done easily using SAS Enterprise Guide's various tasks.

During your presentation, what are the most important highlights or questions that you hoped to cover?
I showed some examples of importing, transposing, binning, recoding, joining, manipulating and creating data, mainly through point and click tasks, with a few simple expressions.