Being able to access information about your operating system from within SAS can be incredibly useful. For example, if you have a directory that contains an unknown number of CSV files that you would like to read into SAS, you certainly would not want to have to write an IMPORT
PROC DS2 (DS2) is a new SAS programming language that extends the power of the traditional DATA step. Some customers have wondered if this new functionality is simply the “DATA step on steroids,” meaning that we simply added more robust functionality so that it’s a replacement for the DATA step.
As support analysts in the SAS Technical Support division, we answer many phone calls from SAS customers. As members of the SAS Foundation team, we get questions that vary significantly in content from all of the areas that we support. We offer coding tips and suggestions as well as point
Will indexing my SAS data sets help? This is one of the most frequent questions I hear in SAS Technical Support. The response is always the same: “Maybe. Tell me about your data, and what you are doing with it.” Here is a primer on effective indexing. Indexing can improve
If your graphics look a little on the fuzzy or blurry side, there are lots of ways to increase the resolution of your SAS graphics output. Let’s go over some of these methods. Before increasing the resolution of your graphics output, check to see what you are creating your graphics
A coworker was recently in need of some simple graphics to include in a slide show to accompany her SAS Global Forum paper. After listening to what she wanted, I decided that I could use PROC SGPLOT to create those images for her. The first image was a set of stacked
Many users of ODS Graphics will be excited to learn that, beginning with SAS® 9.4 TS1M3, SG procedures are able to recognize formatted values that contain Unicode values. One benefit of this is that it allows you to include, without using annotation, special symbols such as greater-than-or-equal-to signs or Greek
SAS users often ask me about the best way to group or bin their data in preparation for additional analysis. Depending on the need, there are several ways to achieve this using SAS procedures or other SAS processing. Creating user-defined formats with PROC FORMAT or using Data step processing are
Customizing the output data set created using the OUTPUT statement When you request statistics on the PROC MEANS statement, the default printed output creates a nice table with the analysis variable names in the left-most column and the statistics forming the additional columns. Even if you create an output data
Within the SAS DATA step, the LAG function is provided to return a variable’s value from a previous data set observation. With certain data criteria, sometimes there is a need to look ahead at the next observation and you would expect to use a LEAD function, but this does not
