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
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
To kick off his presentation at MWSUG2015, SAS’ Chevell Parker flashed a picture of an old-school phone booth and asked the audience where he could find the nearest one. Met with several seconds of silence, he smiled. “Don’t all answer at once!” The point of his question was obvious: as
As of Visual Analytics 7.2, the home page is designed to serve as the entry point for not only Visual Analytics, but also additional SAS applications and solutions. To this end, the SAS Visual Analytics home page is documented in both the SAS Visual Analytics Administration Guide and the SAS Intelligence
Good news SAS users; you are a hot commodity. That’s the primary message Kirk Paul Lafler from Software Intelligence Corporation and Charlie Shipp of Consider Consulting Corporation delivered to a room full of users at MWSUG 2015. Citing figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a recent CNN Money
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
Creating a grocery shopping list can be overwhelming for a variety of reasons. Lack of experience, picky eaters, and new recipes can turn an ambitious cook into an overwhelmed procrastinator. In this blog post I’ll show you an easy SAS Enterprise Guide project that uses prompts to create a simple
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
The SAS Visual Analytics 7.2 release introduced context sensitive URLs for VA reports which means we can now directly pass parameter values in the URLs! This opens the door and allows for greater flexibility when needing to use a URL to access a VA report. One use would be if
Ask any user how they first learned SAS and there’s a good chance they’ll cite The Little SAS Book as a resource they used to get started. Authors Lora Delwiche, Susan Slaughter, and Rebecca Ottesen have written a new book that promises to be just as helpful to new SAS
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
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
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
➤ DISCLOSURE! In June 2018 Google introduced changes to the way it handles its Maps platform. They now require API key in order to embed a map, plus Google Maps "projects" must now be associated with a billing account. Unless these new Google rules are met, Google maps described in
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
How many times have you had a need to convert between variable types such as converting character to numeric or numeric to character? For example, what if you have a character variable with numeric values but you need to perform some calculations? Or, if you have a numeric variable but
SAS Event Stream Processing that is! The latest release of SAS Event Stream Processing will launch May 12, and numerous customers around the globe are already using it. So what’s the big deal? Why event streams are important to business SAS Event Stream Processing allows organizations to react to events
An Info Window is a SAS Visual Analytics pop-up window that provides additional information when a user selects a report object. When designing your report, you can think of an Info Window as simply an additional report section that is defined as hidden. Now that you know what an Info
Last week, Sara Jones shared a list of sample session agendas designed to help you build your personal SAS Global Forum 2015 schedule. But what if there are other areas of interest or topics you’d like to focus on? This is the first in a series of blog posts that
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
It may never crossed your mind, but there are real-life cases when reversing graph axes make sense. For example, when Y-axis represents a depth under the sea level or depth of oil well drilling, it makes perfect sense to have zero on top and positive numbers increasing from top down.
This blog is not about the original movie The More the Merrier (1943) or its remake, Walk, Don’t Run (1966), which I’ve actually seen a couple of times. It’s actually about the wide variety of descriptive statistics available in SAS Visual Analytics—and when you want to examine the characteristics of
Does your week start on Sunday or Monday? Do you have a promotional product you would like to see at the top of your list? Do you have a particular order in which you like to view your regions? Custom sorting is now possible with SAS Visual Analytics 7.1. The
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
In the latest release of SAS Visual Analytics Designer, a parameter is a variable whose value can be changed and that can be referenced by other report objects. Why is this an important introduction? This addition means that, not only can you design interactive reports via prompt controls, those controls
Everyone is always looking for test data. Business analysts want it for demos and prototypes. Software developers want it for development and unit testing. Testers want it for system and integration testing. I’ve written many programs to generate test data over the years, as have many other SAS users. Generated
New Year to me is always a stark reminder of the inexorability of Time. In a day-to-day life, time is measured in small denominations - minutes, hours, days… But come New Year, and this inescapable creature – Time – makes its decisive leap – and in a single instant, we
This is the last of my series of posts on the NIST definition of cloud computing. As you can see from this Wikipedia definition, calling anything a “cloud” is likely to be the fuzziest way of describing it. In meteorology, a cloud is a visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen
In a recent post, I talked about the 5 essential characteristics of cloud computing. In today’s post, I will cover the three service models available in the cloud as they are defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST. Like the story of Goldilocks, when it comes
