SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 began shipping last week. Of the many new features, some are "biggies" while others are more subtle. My favorite new features are those for SAS programmers, including several items that I've heard customers ask for specifically. I'll describe them briefly here; the SAS Enterprise Guide online
In response to my recent post about how to use the PALETTE function in SAS/IML to generate color ramps, a reader wrote the following: The PALETTE function returns an array of hexadecimal values such as CXF03B20. For those of us who think about colors as RGB values, is there an
When I create a graph of data that contains a categorical variable, I rarely want to display the categories in alphabetical order. For example, the box plot to the left is a plot of 10 standardized variables where the variables are ordered by their median value. The ordering makes it
In the first Star Wars movie, Obi-wan uses Jedi mind tricks to convince the stormtroopers that the droids they see are not the droids they're looking for. A colleague at SAS passed along a question from a SAS user where the column labels they were seeing were NOT the labels
We all know the importance of understanding the data you are working with. After all, the best programmers we know have combined their lifelong pursuit of programming knowledge with a similar pursuit of some specific subject matter. I have programmed in SAS for about 15 years and have pursued expertise
Madison Avenue has a new phrase to describe the things they are trying to sell to us: artisan crafted. These days, there are artisan crafted breads and rolls, artisan crafted beers, artisan crafted coffees, artisan crafted soaps, and a host of other artisan crafted products. Artisan crafted seems to have
When you run a program or task in SAS Enterprise Guide, the application wraps your job in an "ODS sandwich", the colloquial term we use for the ODS statements necessary to create output that can be viewed in your project. That's convenient for exploring and refining your program, but at
These two tutorial videos will show you how to filter and sort data in Base SAS. In this first video, you will learn to use a WHERE statement in Base SAS to filter or subset SAS data. Data sets can be very large and filtering data enables you to select
In this video, you learn how to use a SET statement in the DATA step to read a SAS data set using Base SAS. The DATA step is a very powerful tool for data manipulation. You can watch more video tutorials by visiting: support.sas.com/training/tutorial/. To learn more about the SAS
On any given day, on an average, good programmers spend maybe about 10-20% of their time writing code. And the remaining 90% thinking, researching, and experimenting to find the best design. With so much thinking time, they need every bit of help to reduce the amount of typing time. Not-so-good
I've been a busy Jedi the last few months and have spent the bulk of my non-teaching days learning new Jedi SAS tricks to share with you. The finishing touches are going on to our brand-new, one and a half day DS2 Programming: Essentials class. It's rolling out on December 16
My daughter's middle school math class recently reviewed how to compute the greatest common factor (GCF) and the least common multiple (LCM) of a set of integers. (The GCF is sometimes called the greatest common divisor, or GCD.) Both algorithms require factoring integers into a product of primes. While helping
Data cardinality is an important topic for for data analysis. In mathematical terms, cardinality is simply the number of elements in a set. But in data applications, cardinality signifies the number of unique values for a given field of data. Related terms include number of levels (thank you, PROC FREQ
Has this ever happened to you? You have a SAS program with statements that you wrote, then you make use of a macro function or %include file supplied by a helpful colleague, and when your SAS code resumes, you find that all of your SAS titles have been changed out
A couple of years ago I shared a method for copying any file within a SAS program. It was a simple approach, copying the file byte-by-byte from one fileref (SAS file reference) to another. My colleague Bruno Müller, a SAS trainer in Switzerland, has since provided a much more robust
Last week I presented two talks at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, which has established a new Graduate Certificate in Applied Data Analysis Using SAS. While in Milwaukee, I ran into an old friend: the ODS LISTING destination. One of my presentations was a hands-on workshop titled Getting Started
Recently I wrote about how to determine the age of your SAS release. Experienced SAS programmers know that you can programatically determine information about your SAS release by using certain automatic macro variables that SAS provides: SYSVER: contains the major and minor version of the SAS release SYSVLONG: contains the
Even the best programmers make mistakes. For most errors, SAS software displays the nature and location of the error, returns control to the programmer, and awaits further instructions. However, there are a handful of insidious errors that cause SAS to think that a statement or program is not finished. For
Occasionally, people ask me what is the best thing about writing a book. Is it the notoriety you get from being a SAS Press author? Fame is always pleasant. Is it the money you make from the advance and the royalties? Money is always useful. Is it displaying technical expertise
In SAS 9.4, the SAS programming language continues add new features by the truckload. I've already discussed PROC DELETE (which is actually an old feature, but like an 80s hit song it's now back with a better version). In this SAS Tech Talk video from SAS Global Forum 2013, I
With the pervasiveness of mobile devices, being able to read while “on the go” has been easier than ever. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where you pass the time waiting by reading something on your phone/iPad/tablet etc? With eBooks on my iPad, I find that
Tried, tested and true -- I’m sure you already practice some, if not all, of these efficient techniques to save resources. I recently shared these 10 techniques with the Wisconsin Illinois SAS users group in Milwaukee. The conference ran smoothly under the incredibly able guidance of Dr. LeRoy Bessler. I’ll
Every programming language has an IF-THEN statement that branches according to whether a Boolean expression is true or false. In SAS, the IF-THEN (or IF-THEN/ELSE) statement evaluates an expression and braches according to whether the expression is nonzero (true) or zero (false). The basic syntax is if numeric-expression then do-computation;
When I work on SAS projects that create lots of files as results, it's often a requirement that those files be organized in a certain folder structure. The exact structure depends on the project, but here's an example: /results |__ html |__ images |__ xls |__ data Before you can
I am not a big fan of the macro language, and I try to avoid it when I write SAS/IML programs. I find that the programs with many macros are hard to read and debug. Furthermore, the SAS/IML language supports loops and indexing, so many macro constructs can be replaced
If you've watched any of the demos for SAS Visual Analytics (or even tried it yourself!), you have probably seen this nifty exploration of multiple measures. It's a way to look at how multiple measures are correlated with one another, using a diagonal heat map chart. The "stronger" the color
One of the great things about SAS libraries is that you can write your programs to read and write data without having to worry about where the data lives. SAS data set on a file system? Oracle table in a database server? Hadoop data in Hive? For many SAS applications,
This week's SAS tip is from Ron Cody and his latest book Cody's Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks and How to Tackle Them. Learn more about this esteemed user and his many bestselling SAS books--as well as get additional bonus content on his author page. The following excerpt is from
I've conducted a lot of univariate analyses in SAS, yet I'm always surprised when the best way to carry out the analysis uses a SAS regression procedure. I always think, "This is a univariate analysis! Why am I using a regression procedure? Doesn't a regression require at least two variables?"
We’ve gone mobile so you can too. Come see us at SAS Global Forum and be one of the first to try our new e-Courses on the tablet! SAS Programming 1 and SAS Programming 2, soon available on your tablet devices, also feature free access to the SAS Practice editor
