In pharmaceutical research, analysts often want to see the number of respondents who are at each site and the treatment they receive. Apparently, there's more than one way to produce correct results when you are using the PROC MEANS procedure. In Janet Willis' paper, Do You Have Too Much Class?, (awarded Best
Are you considering submitting a paper to the SAS Global Forum? The deadline for submissions is right around the corner – here’s some ideas to help you get your paper selected! Steve Overton and Tricia Aanderud have presented papers at several of the SAS user groups and here are a
'Develop an Analytic Center of Excellence (COE)' could be translated to – develop a culture of analytics in your organization such that every department and division sees value in analytics and pursues measurement for all strategic decisions.
Justin Smith and William “Gui” Zupko were looking at manufacturing data over time and wanted to know the minimum value in their dataset, and they wanted to pinpoint its exact location – the specific row and column. PROC ARIMA uses the ARIMA (auto-regressive integrated moving average) model or the ARMA
Editor's note: This post was updated on 8/5/16. “One time a fellow came up to me and said, ‘Tell me something unique about you,” said David Chapman, of Chapman Analytics, “I said, ‘I used SAS when SAS was free.” Needless to say, Chapman has been using SAS for a long
Did I tell you that I went to Andrew Kuligowski's hands-on workshop while I was at MWSUG 2012? Actually, I only attended the first portion of his session; it didn't make sense for me to take up a computer since I'm not a programmer. His workshop was to teach users how to parse useful data from unusual
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
You’ve just started a new job as SAS administrator, and there’s no documentation. How do you know which SAS products are installed? Where they are deployed? Where do the data and programs reside? Brian Varney tells us that SAS administrators often run into undocumented environments whenever they begin working in a new
Never been to Houston? November 5-6 is perfect for your first trip. Make plans to see some of what the fourth-largest city in the US has to offer; there are some famous visitor destinations - and some not well-known. The South Central SAS Users group is holding its annual SAS Educational Forum in this
It's hard to get away from data these days, especially Big Data. The news is full of stories about how fast it's accumulating, about technologies for capturing and analyzing it, and about the creative ways organizations are using it. Pundits have even dubbed personal data the “new oil” that will
Sigurd Hermansen, from Westat, got his idea for breaking big data into small pieces after watching Jim Goodnight dissect a blade server to show the power high-performance analytics has processing for big data. Goodnight also demonstrated how Visual Analytics Explorer transfers the data from the servers to a workstation and
You may still believe that Hadoop is going to solve all of the world’s problems with big data. It won’t. Hadoop is a framework for storing large-scale data processing with both pros and cons for organizations. Christopher Stevens, from Greenplum, explained that Hadoop is rapidly becoming the go-to for big
Leanne Tang has learned a lot about encoding in her work of providing relevant user data and securing the database from accidental changes. There are hundreds of SAS users at the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Tang didn’t want to create thousands of accounts and passwords to allow those users to
Congratulations to all of these winners in the MWSUG Best Contibuted Papers! I hope you have all submitted your papers to the 2013 SAS Global Forum. The deadline for submissions ends soon! Here's a list that I know you have all been waiting for:
Leanne Tang had a problem. She has one giant database that houses data from all of the units at National Agricultural Statistics Service. She has hundreds of people who need access, but she wants individual users to have access only to the data that meets their needs. In Tang’s
Do you finish the Word Search in the Sunday paper? Several years ago, Robert Matthews decided to design a word search to help his kids in their school work. Matthews wanted to be able to put in the words of his choice and provide difficulty levels so that game users could
The Macro facility is a powerful and flexible tool, but sloppy techniques can make macros one of your biggest headaches. Poorly handled macros may run without error but leave your users with unexpected results and litter your system with unwanted files and variables.
I have to say that I've never heard of the Bubble option, so I looked it up on support.sas.com (my go-to place for searches on customer problems or to simply to learn something about SAS). The search led me to documentation for the statement options in SAS ODS Graphics. So, I assume the
Congratulations to all of these presenters for having been selected as Best Contributed Paper at WUSS 2012. Make sure you read all of the proceedings - you don't want to miss anything.
I chose this Post-It note this week because it reminded me of a MWSUG paper presentation that I listened to and wrote about. Patricia Hettinger presented "New vs. Old - Under the Hood with PROCs CONTENTS and COMPARE" in the Data Management and Data Mining section. I didn't do it justice in my
If you remember Andy Kuligowski for nothing else, you probably remember that he was the SAS Global Forum conference chair for 2012. I remember that he has a wonderful sense of humor, which he used more than once during his Hands on Workshop at the MidWest SAS Users Group conference
Chris Hemedinger is not the only person who’s excited about the capabilities of SAS Enterprise Guide. Tom Miron, from Systems Seminar Consultants, a SAS author with more than 35 years of SAS experience, shared some great advice for using SAS Enterprise Guide.
There are five short, simple, quick rules to help you take advantage of indexes. An index lets you retrieve information from SAS data sets or tables. And according to Kirk Paul Lafler, if you keep these rules in mind, your information retrieval will be more efficient. Lafler is the Senior
Are you just starting out in your career? What if you think you’ve been around the block and there is nothing new you can do in your career? Everyone has their own perspective on what career planning is, but Bill Donovan from OckhamSource has a plan to help SAS users make a career
Every fall (fall in the US, that is), I try to attend as many SAS Users Groups events as humanly possible. This year, I’m starting with the MidWest SAS Users Groups conference in Minneapolis, then SouthEast SAS Users Group conference in Durham, NC (my home base) and finishing the season
“It’s the age of the search engine! I remember people ‘Yahoo!’ing during the late 90's and ‘Google’ing till the late 2k's and now ‘Bing’ing. I just wondered, ‘Why not SAS?’” wrote Pramod. R on his blog SASopedia. This was the beginning of a quest and a MidWest SAS Users Groups
There are times when programmers need to know the source of the data sets used in a program. This macro, designed by Prasanna Murugesan and Sushant Thakare from Quintiles Inc., will help you extract the lib names from various programs and put them in an Excel file.
I know that for every SAS user event there are many people who aren't able to attend or who have to choose between two or more great sessions. So a couple of days ago, I started a discussion on several SAS users LinkedIn groups asking those of you who are attending SAS Users Groups
As summer comes to an end, I find myself getting excited about some of the regional user group conferences that take place every fall. This year, I’ll be presenting a paper at WUSS (Western Users of SAS Software) in Long Beach, CA, in early September. About one week later, I’m
As a trainer for SAS Education Australia and chairperson of the local SAS User Group, QUEST (Queensland Users Exploring SAS Technology) , I meet many new SAS users over the years. In July 2011, I met Kim MacKenzie, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia at an Enterprise
