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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Kevin RussellApril 18, 2014 4

Make your macro invocations data driven!

Some very common questions we receive into Technical Support are, “I need to be able to send the data for every hospital listed in my data set to a separate .csv file. How can I do that?” Or, “How can I run a PROC REPORT for each region listed in

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Programming Tips

Jane EslingerMarch 14, 2014 2

How to avoid 6 common PROC REPORT errors

Like every SAS procedure, PROC REPORT generates error messages that are specific to that procedure. Some of these errors are easier to understand and work around than others. In this blog post, I show six of the trickiest errors, explain what might be causing the error, and give advice for

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Programming Tips

Kim WilsonFebruary 21, 2014 9

What happens when the SET statement misbehaves—and how you can fix it!

Most SAS programmers would agree that they use the SET statement without giving much thought to the syntax, because it’s such a widely used statement of choice. We routinely name the expected data sets and possibly a few options, and away we go. A visit to the documentation can be

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Programming Tips

Falko SchulzDecember 19, 2013 11

Santa's route in SAS Visual Analytics

Being so close before Christmas I thought it would be a good idea to see what route Santa Claus is planning this year. Not just because I'm living in Australia and Santa usually comes in t-shirts & shorts but also because it's a long way to get down here. So

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Programming Tips

Christina HarveyOctober 25, 2013 2

Do you understand the Program Data Vector?

Stick to the basics. Did you ever get that advice? Two of the papers at MidWest SAS Users Group 2013 used that most fundamental of SAS processing concepts—the Program Data Vector—to show why users might encounter unexpected errors in their DATA step programs. In The Secret Life of DATA STEP,

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Christina HarveyJuly 8, 2013 0

A Day in the Life: Inspiration for your next paper

Four authors. Four papers. One set of data. The month of August and the 2014 Call for Content are just around the corner, and this seems like a good time to share a little inspiration and innovation. The Foundations and Fundamentals paper section at SAS Global Forum 2013 featured a four-part

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Natalie MeyerJune 24, 2013 0

Dreading code reviews? Don’t be!

Every programmer may dread the thought of a colleague peeking over his or her shoulder, double-checking code, but SAS Global Forum paper winner David Scocca has offered his tips for making code reviews a painless process. His paper, Communicating Standards: A Code Review Experience, is a must-read. Here’s a peek

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Programming Tips

Praveen SawhJune 21, 2013 0

Keys to the kingdom—using metadata to build a database

If you routinely import data from external sources, chances are you’ve learned the value in having a systematic import process. In this post, I will begin sharing my approach of using metadata tables to guide the importing of data.

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Programming Tips

Lane WhatleyMay 24, 2013 0

Be nimble, be swift, be Agile

At SAS, one of our core values is to be swift and agile. So it makes sense that our software development be Agile too. The Agile methodology has been around for more than 10 years and was designed with software development in mind. Today, it is still used predominately for

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Waynette TubbsMay 10, 2013 0

3 of 30: Tricks for reducing CPU time

Do you remember when CPU time was a high-priced commodity? "Today, if you are any good at what you do, the constrained resource is you," says Timothy Berryhill from Wells Fargo. Berryhill has years of experience with SAS on "many platforms and operating systems." He says there are several things

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