As part of the Friday's Innovation Inspiration (FII) series, I've decided to present a few SAS techniques and problem solvers that you labeled as innovative or 'inspirational'. These are pretty easy to find: I've done some digging through the Best Contributed Papers. I know you haven't read them all, so here's a good reason to go back and find more.

A Best Contributed Paper from MWSUG 2012 makes its way into our series this week. Richard Koopman Jr. received an award for "Building Macros and Tracking Their Use" in the Coder's Corner section.

Reducing macro chaos

For tasks that you do often, you can automate them using macros. This saves time and brain power, and it can help you reduce errors. If you are in charge of tracking macro use in your organization, how do you know what macros are in use, when they're called and by whom? According to Koopman's abstract, "Adding a few lines of code to individual macros can make tracking a trivial task."

Koopman's paper provides a "framework for developing component macros that report back macro usage." He developed the framework in a SAS 9.1/9.2 client-server environment (running under Windows XP, 32-bit), but he assures SAS users that "it should work under any client-server environment and could be modified to run under disparate clients sharing a common networked drive."

Take a look at his paper and let us know if you also have a solution.