TL; DR Free training from SAS: "SAS Programming for R Users." Check the available Live Web offerings and register for one that fits your schedule. Or use the free e-Learning version and learn at your own pace. The complete course materials are on the SAS Software GitHub space and you
As technology expands, we have a similarly increasing need to create programs that can be handed off – to clients, to regulatory agencies, to parent companies, or to other projects – and handed off with little or no modification needed by the recipient. Minimizing modification by the recipient often requires
JSON is the new XML. The number of SAS users who need to access JSON data has skyrocketed, thanks mainly to the proliferation of REST-based APIs and web services. Because JSON is structured data in text format, we've been able to offer simple parsing techniques that use DATA step and
In my earlier post about WHERE and IF statements, I announced that the DATA step debugger has finally arrived in SAS Enterprise Guide. (I admit that I might have buried the lead in that post.) Let's use this post to talk about the new debugger and how it works. First,
Do you want to create customized SAS graphs by using PROC SGPLOT and the other ODS graphics procedures? An essential skill that you need to learn is how to merge, join, append, and concatenate SAS data sets that come from different sources. The SAS statistical graphics procedures (SG procedures) enable
In the DATA step, the WHERE statement and the IF statement (a.k.a. the "subsetting IF") have similar functions. In many scenarios, they produce identical results. But new SAS programmers are taught early on that these two statements work very differently, and in important ways. To understand the differences, it helps
Using the DATASETS procedure, we can easily modify SAS variable attributes such as name, format, informat and label: proc datasets library=libref; modify table_name; format var_name date9.; informat var_name mmddyy10.; label var_name = 'New label'; rename var_name = var_new_name; quit; We cannot, however, modify fixed variable attributes such as variable type
If you obtain data from web sites, social media, or other unstandardized data sources, you might not know the form of dates in the data. For example, the US Independence Day might be represented as "04JUL1776", "07/04/1776", "Jul 4, 1776", or "July 4, 1776." Fortunately, the ANYDTDTE informat makes it
My river walk last week turned into a spectacular fall show. But if it rains this week in San Antonio, like the weatherman predicts, what will I do? In the coming days, I’ll be presenting at two user groups, one in eastern Canada in Halifax, and the other all the
SAS programmers often resort to using the X command to list the contents of file directories and to process the contents of ZIP files. In centralized SAS environments, the X command is unavailable to most programmers. NOXCMD is the default setting for these environments (disallowing shell commands), and SAS admins
The WHERE clause in SAS is a powerful mechanism for selecting observations as you read or write a data set. The WHERE clause supports many operators, including the IN operator, which enables you to compactly specify multiple conditions for a categorical variable. A common use of the IN operator is
First, if you landed on this topic because you encountered this SAS message: ERROR 180-322: Statement is not valid or it is used out of proper order. ...then I'll tell you right now: you've probably left off a semicolon in one of your SAS statements. If you're lucky, the SAS
A colleague approached me with this very important business problem: Every Friday at SAS HQ, SAS cafe staff provides a breakfast goodie in our breakrooms. Often the supplied goodie is delicious, but sometimes it's more...well...healthy. I want to know whether I should eat my breakfast before I leave home on
SAS formats are flexible, dynamic, and have many uses. For example, you can use formats to count missing values and to change the order of a categorical variable in a table or plot. Did you know that you can also use SAS formats to recode a variable or to bin
I'm addicted to you. You're a hard habit to break. Such a hard habit to break. — Chicago, "Hard Habit To Break" Habits are hard to break. For more than 20 years I've been putting semicolons at the end of programming statements in SAS, C/C++, and Java/Javascript. But lately I've been
I've been working on a SAS program that can add content to the SAS Support Communities (more on that in a future post). Despite my 20+ years of SAS experience, there are a lot of SAS programming tricks that I don't know. Or that I use so infrequently that I
One thing that we have a lot of at SAS: installations of SAS software that we can run. I have SAS for Windows on my laptop, and I have access to many centralized instances of SAS that run on Linux and Windows servers. (I also have access to mainframe SAS,
Every beginning SAS programmer learns the simple IF-THEN/ELSE statement for conditional processing in the SAS DATA step. The basic If-THEN statement handles two cases: if a condition is true, the program does one thing, otherwise the program does something else. Of course, you can handle more cases by using multiple
The one thing, above all others, that I wish PROC REPORT could do is know which observations from my data set that I want kept together on a single page of non-Listing output. This is problematic for two reasons. 1. PROC REPORT cannot read my mind! 2. PROC REPORT does
Last week I analyzed 12 million records of taxi cab transactions in New York City. As part of that analysis, I used a DATA step view to create a new variable, which was the ratio of the tip amount to the fare amount. A novice SAS programmer told me that
Have you ever used SAS to produce reports for publishing? Have you ever thought of or been told about suppressing data in such reports? Why do we need to suppress (in the sense of withholding, concealing, obscuring or hiding) data in published reports? The reason is simple - in order
I know what you're thinking: two "Boaty McBoatface" articles within two weeks? And we're past April Fool's Day? But since I posted my original analysis about the "Name our ship" phenomenon that's happening in the UK right now, a new contender has appeared: Poppy-Mai. The cause of Poppy-Mai, a critically
In a voting contest, is it possible for a huge population to get behind a ridiculous candidate with such force that no other contestant can possibly catch up? The answer is: Yes. Just ask the folks at NERC, the environmental research organization in the UK. They are commissioning a new
In previous articles, I've shared tips about how you can work with SAS and ZIP files without requiring an external tool like WinZip, gzip, or 7-Zip. I've covered: How to create ZIP files with ODS PACKAGE ZIP (available since SAS 9.2) How to "unzip" and read ZIP files using FILENAME
One of the first things SAS programmers learn is that SAS data sets can be specified in two ways. You can use a two-level name such as "sashelp.class" which uses a SAS libref (SASHELP) and a member name (CLASS) to specify the location of the data set. Alternatively, you can
A dummy variable (also known as indicator variable) is a numeric variable that indicates the presence or absence of some level of a categorical variable. The word "dummy" does not imply that these variables are not smart. Rather, dummy variables serve as a substitute or a proxy for a categorical
TL;DR The next time that you find yourself writing a PROC SORT step, verify that you're working with the SAS Base engine and not a database. If your data is in a database, skip the SORT! The details: When to skip the PROC SORT step Many SAS procedures allow you
Novice SAS programmers quickly learn the advantages of using PROC SORT to sort data, followed by a BY-group analysis of the sorted data. A typical example is to analyze demographic data by state or by ZIP code. A BY statement enables you to produce multiple analyses from a single procedure
Parameters in SAS procedures are specified a list of values that you manually type into the procedure syntax. For example, if you want to specify a list of percentile values in PROC UNIVARIATE, you need to type the values into the PCTLPTS= option as follows: proc univariate data=sashelp.cars noprint; var
I began 2016 by compiling a list of popular articles from my blog in 2015. This "People's Choice" list contains many interesting articles, but some of my personal favorites did not make the list. Today I present the "Editor's Choice" list of articles that deserve a second look. I've grouped
