If you have programmed with SAS in the last 15 years, you have probably had a reason to share your SAS results in PDF format. The ODS PDF destination, much like a well-designed car, has evolved over the years, offering progressively nicer features like security, enhanced image formatting and embedded
In Microsoft Excel, a PivotTable can help you to create an interactive view of summarized data. Within a PivotTable, it’s easy to adjust the dimensions (columns and rows) and calculated measures to suit your ad-hoc reporting needs. You can also create a PivotChart – similar in concept to a PivotTable, but
Have you ever created a SAS macro variable and at resolution time received a warning that it did not exist? Many times this warning is because your program referenced the macro variable outside the scope it was created in. Every macro variable created is stored in one of two symbol
“Here’s Johnny!!!” and well sometimes John and sometimes Jonathan and sometimes Jon. In the real world, you sometimes need to make matching character strings more flexible. This is especially common when merging data sets. Variables, especially names, are not always exactly the same in all sources of your data. When
If you haven’t tried them for your web applications and other graphics needs, you’ll want to read further! Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) output is vector graphics output you can display with most (if not all) modern web browsers. Because SVG graphic output is scalable, you can zoom in on the
Arrays are a powerful SAS programming tool. They can be used to simplify coding for repetitive calculations, to transpose data and to evaluate variables in a non-sequential manner. Sometimes users are intimidated by the term array, but in SAS, an array is simply a grouping of variables that lasts for
Have you ever received an error or warning in SAS macro and did not know what to do next or even where to look? Now there is an answer! And debugging your SAS macros just got easier. All macro errors and warnings are now documented in the SAS 9.4 Macro
Beginning with the first maintenance of SAS 9.4, you have the ability to define your own symbol markers using the SYMBOLCHAR and SYMBOLIMAGE statements. With these statements you can select a Unicode value or you can select an image file that exists on the local file system—making the possibilities for
The only thing that’s constant is change. The continual cycle of computing changes leads to common questions about the effects of these changes—operating systems are getting upgraded, customers are moving to new SAS clients, upgrading to new releases of SAS, working with new Java and browser versions. All of these
If you live in an English speaking country you are used to a relatively unadorned alphabet. Take a look at the French and Spanish languages, where vowels are decorated with accents like “acción” in Spanish, and the circumflex, or the hat used in “pâte” in French. Look at the gorgeous
The major benefit of 64-bit applications is that they no longer have the memory limitation imposed by their 32-bit predecessors. This is why many SAS customers are making the transition from 32-bit SAS to 64-bit SAS. The move to 64-bit SAS can be daunting at first sight. There are many
Are there times when you need to pass special characters to a macro variable but cannot find the right technique to accomplish the task? In this article I’ll discuss the different macro quoting functions and give a simple technique to help you determine which macro quoting function to use. Why
Did you inherit code that was written eons ago? Do you find old programs to copy the PROC REPORT code and then simply change the variable names for your new program? Have you wondered what all of those options do? Do you ever send output to the Listing destination (the
Frequently you may want to modify the default colors, line patterns and symbols that are displayed on the graphics output produced by the Statistical Graphics, or SG procedures, and the Graph Template Language, GTL. Enhancements in SAS 9.4 have made that task much easier! In the examples below, we will look
It’s an understatement to say there are many Base SAS procedures! Some procedures may be used for basic report writing. Other procedures may be used to perform statistical analysis. Some have similar functions. Others are unique in the output that they can produce. Which procedure you choose generally depends on
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
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
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
