My children learned this skill early in life: when you want to secure permission for a questionable activity (say, "watch 5 hours of Phineas and Ferb" or "eat a bowl of candy for breakfast"), you should approach the most lenient adult in the household. In my early days of fatherhood,
Microsoft Windows 8 has been with us for a year, and its first major update -- Windows 8.1 -- has just arrived. So how does SAS support these Windows 8 platforms? The answer can be found on support.sas.com in SAS Note 46876. I'll summarize it here: SAS 9.3 and SAS
Earlier this week I described a common programming pattern in the SAS macro language. The pattern sets up a loop for processing each distinct value of a classification variable. The program uses the PROC SQL SELECT INTO feature to populate SAS macro variables. The effect: you can roll your own
A well-formed WHERE statement or subsetting IF can narrow down the output of your SAS DATA step. The SAS log does a good job of telling you how many records were processed by the action. For example, let's look at this simple DATA step with my "poor man's random sample",
Note: as this is a popular topic, I've added a few notes with minor updates, including a link to a popular how-to tutorial video. In case you missed it, the first maintenance release for SAS 9.3 was recently released. Because we're all friends here, you may call it "SAS 9.3M1"
It's been a well-known limitation for a long time. When you connect to a SAS session using SAS Enterprise Guide, shell commands (including X command, SYSTASK, and FILENAME PIPE) are off-limits because the default SAS invocation disables them. It does this by including -NOXCMD as a command-line option. This makes
One of the great innovations with SAS 9.3 is the focus on ODS statistical graphics. "Wait a minute," you're thinking, "weren't ODS graphics added in SAS 9.2?" Yes, that's true. But with SAS 9.3 there is even more capability: more analytical SAS procedures support the graphs, and there are more
Rick Wicklin created his own list of Five Interface and Graphics Features that Everyone Can Use. It's a very good summary of what you'll immediately notice when you use analytics procedures in SAS display manager: cool graphs turned on by default. For SAS Enterprise Guide users, you won't see such
Alison posted the Top 10 Reasons you should care about SAS 9.3. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it reflects just a sample of the thousands of features and tweaks that you'll see in this new release. Even with SAS 9.2, I was nowhere near exhausting my backlog of blog topics...but
It seems like such a simple problem: how can you reliably compute the age of someone or something? Susan lamented the subtle issues using the YRDIF function exactly 1.0356164384 years ago. Sure, you could write your own function for calculating such things, as I suggested 0.1753424658 years ago. Or you
As I write this, SAS 9.3 has not yet been "shipped", but its release is imminent. I've already heard many questions about how SAS Enterprise Guide works with the new version, so I decided to write this "Frequently-soon-to-be-asked questions" document to help sort it out. What version of SAS Enterprise
