Have you heard? The ODS Destination for PowerPoint Has a New Option It’s true. The ODS destination for PowerPoint now has the STARTPAGE= option, which provides you with greater control and flexibility when creating presentations. Added to the ODS POWERPOINT statement in SAS® 9.4TS1M4, the STARTPAGE= option enables you to
Reading an external file that contains delimiters (commas, tabs, or other characters such as a pipe character or an exclamation point) is easy when you use the IMPORT procedure. It's easy in that variable names are on row 1, the data starts on row 2, and the first 20 rows
The SGPLOT procedure (as well as other ODS Graphics procedures) does a great job of creating nice- looking output with very little coding. However, there are times when you want to make adjustments to the output's appearance. For those occasions, we have an ATTRS for that! The statements in PROC
The stored compiled macro facility enables you to compile and save your macro definition in a permanent catalog in a library that you specify. The macro is compiled only once. When you call the macro in the current and subsequent SAS® sessions, SAS executes the compiled code from the macro
SAS® offers several ways that you can find the top n% and bottom n% of data values based on a numeric variable. The RANK procedure with the GROUPS= option is one method. Another method is The UNIVARIATE procedure with the PCTLPTS= option. Because there are several ways to perform this
Have you ever written a macro and wondered if there was an easy way to pass values to the macro? You can by using macro parameters. Macro parameters enable you to pass values into the macro at macro invocation, and set default values for macro variables within the macro definition.
Technical Support regularly receives incoming calls from customers who have encountered the following transcoding warning: WARNING: Some character data was lost during transcoding in the data set xxx.xxx. Either the data contains characters that are not representable in the new encoding or truncation occurred during transcoding People are not always
When using the SAS® system to email graphics output, a common request is to use SAS to send an email in which the graphics output is embedded in the body of the email. This functionality is not available until the second maintenance release for SAS® 9.4 (TS1M2). If you are
Let’s look at the term “accessible” and how it relates to the SAS world. Accessible output is output that can be read by a screen reader to someone with low or no vision, visualized by someone with low vision or color blindness, or navigated by someone with limited mobility. In
The SAS® Output Delivery System provides the ability to generate output in various destination formats (for example, HTML, PDF, and Excel). One of the more recent destinations, ODS Excel, became production in the third maintenance release for SAS 9.4 (TS1M3). This destination enables you to generate native Microsoft Excel formatted
I remember my grandparents talking about how hard things were for them growing up. They would say, “Things were so bad that we had to walk uphill, both ways, in the freezing snow to get to school.” It was always hard for me to relate to these statements because the
A multilabel format enables you to assign multiple labels to a value or a range of values. The capability to add multilabel formats was added to the FORMAT procedure in SAS® 8.2. You assign multiple labels by specifying the MULTILABEL option in the VALUE statement of PROC FORMAT. For example,
With fall comes cooler weather and, of course, football. Lots of football. Often times there will be two NFL games on that my husband wants to watch at the same time. Instead of flipping back and forth between two television stations, he can watch both games simultaneously, thanks to the
Have you ever needed to run code based on the client application that you are using? Or have you needed to know the version of SAS® software that you are running and the operating system that you are running it on? This blog post describes a few automatic macro variables
If you use SAS® software to create a report that contains multiple graphs, you know that each graph appears on a separate page by default. But now you want to really impress your audience by putting multiple graphs on a page. Keep reading because this blog post describes how to
If you are using the second maintenance release of SAS 9.3 (TS1M2) or later, you might have noticed that you have several map-related libraries that are defined for you. The MAPS library contains the old map data sets that have been provided with SAS/GRAPH® software for many years. The source
When you work out, you probably have a routine set of exercises that you do. But if you read health-and-fitness websites or talk to a personal trainer, you know that for optimal fitness, you should vary your workout routine. Not only does adding variety to your fitness regime help you
XML has become one of the major standards for moving data across the Internet. Some of XML’s strengths are the abilities to better describe data and to be more extensible than any of its predecessors such as CSV. Due to the increased popularity of XML for moving data, I provide
PROC FREQ is often the first choice when you want to generate basic frequency counts, but it is the last choice when it is compared to other statistical reporting procedures. People sometimes consider PROC FREQ last because they think they have little or no control over the appearance of the
The DS2 programming language gives you the following powerful capabilities: The precision that results from using the new supported data types Access to the new expressions, write methods, and packages available in the DS2 syntax Ability to execute SAS Federated Query Language (FedSQL) from within the DS2 program Ability to
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
