If you’ve taken one of my SAS classes you may recall “Mark’s 3 rules of programming”, the first of which is “Lazy programmers are GOOD programmers.” One of the things I love about best about SAS programming is the plethora of functions and shortcuts built into the language, all designed
In a production environment, where dozens of SAS programs are run in sequence, often monthly or quarterly, and where logs can span thousands of lines, it’s easy to overlook the small stuff that can cause data hangovers. Recognize any of these? A temporary data set finds its way into subsequent
With a combined 62 years of experience using SAS and JMP, consultants Kirk Paul Lafler and Charles Edwin Shipp have authored countless papers, articles, books - even puzzles - about analytics. Over the years, they've pretty much seen the world more than a few times during their travels to international,
Telecommuting is not always a matter of working from home. Virtual team workers are often located in a satellite office, in another country or are temporarily out of the office. Today, many managers have no choice but to incorporate telecommuting members into their team structure. Mary Varughese, Mei Dey and
Kathleen Harkins, Carolyn Maass and Mary Anne Rutkowski, from Merck Sharp and Dohme, collaborated to write T.I.P.S: Techniques and information for programming in SAS® for NESUG 2011. These three women are highly experienced programmers: Harkins has more than 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and aerospace industries; Maass has
As far as numbers go, the number zero is rather mysterious for data. Is it something or is it nothing? What happens when you have missing data but enter 0? This topic triggered an intriguing discussion in my recent Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques class. In this post I’d like
The SASonality series is about connecting you with SAS users that you may not have taken time to really get to know. Today, I’m going to introduce you to someone that you’ve seen at the SAS regional users group conferences. As you’ll see after reading his interview, he’s created a
Have you used multivariate procedures in SAS and wanted to save out scores? Some procedures, such as FACTOR, CANDISC, CANCORR, PRINCOMP, and others have an OUT= option to save scores to the input data set. However, to score a new data set, or to perform scoring with multivariate procedures that
Many SAS users receive data in the form of CSV (Comma Separated Value) files, and need to convert them to SAS data sets. A typical record in a CSV file might look like this: Jeter,Derek,1995,,234,”22,600,000” Note the following about the record above: There is no data for the fourth field,
I had the pleasure of attending Gongwei Chen’s SAS Global Forum 2010 presentation, Get Certified as an Advanced SAS® Programmer in Six Months or Less! As you might expect, Gongwei is a Certified Advanced Programmer. To become certified at the advanced level, a programmer must pass both the SAS Base
Jean Balent gave a quick 20-minute presentation of her ideas that may help programmers become more organized and therefore more productive. The presentation is a shortened version of her paper, How to become an organized SAS programmer. In fact, her tips may be useful in other areas of your career.
