When it comes to e-mail-based newsletters, I'm of two minds. On one hand, I feel like I receive enough (or maybe too much) e-mail and I'm reluctant to clog up my inbox with more stuff -- especially if it's information that's located elsewhere (such as on that big backup drive
If you need to calculate the mean, sum, standard deviation, or frequency count for a variable, you'll find it pretty easy to accomplish in SAS Enterprise Guide. The corresponding tasks in the menus have names like "Summary Statistics" or "One-way Frequencies". Obvious, right? Often, researchers or students have a quest
With the London 2012 Olympics around the corner, there are sure to be reports or rumors of performance-enhancing drug use among some athletes. It turns out that using manufactured chemicals to give yourself an edge is frowned upon in the athletic community. However, as a SAS user you should avail
I feel privileged to have been invited back to meet with SAS customers throughout New Zealand and Australia. I also feel lucky to escape the North Carolina summer (with temperatures trending in the 90s Fahrenheit) in exchange for the "winter" weather Down Under. For a good chunk of August, I'll
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
We sometimes take it for granted, but the concept of the "SAS library" is just about one of the most awesome aspects of The SAS System. You can give your library a name (a library reference, or libref), tell the system how to get to your data (options on a
When I encounter an ERROR, WARNING, or NOTE in my SAS log that I don't understand, my first recourse is to ask my friend (we'll call him "Google") what it could mean. I copy the entire message (or at least 5 or 6 consecutive words from it) into the search
I've known several people who were raised during the Great Depression, and I've observed that they are very mindful of waste. My wife's grandmother used to save plastic bags, twist ties, and relatively clean aluminum foil for potential reuse in the household -- because such materials were once scarce. The
Millions of Americans will be gathering around the television this Sunday to watch Super Bowl XLV. They'll gather in bars and private homes, prepare billions of calories worth of snacks, and root for their favorite teams. But if you're looking for an alternate form of entertainment, why not watch "New
Last week I presented a SAS Talks session for SAS programmers using SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. It was well attended, which pleased me. You never know how it's going to go with a webinar. People register and sign in, but they are at their desks in their offices/cubicles/homes where distractions
I'm pleased to announce that I'll be presenting another SAS Talks session on January 27th, 2011 (this month!). This talk will focus on the cool stuff in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3, especially for the SAS programmer. Here's some of what you'll learn about: Syntax suggestion and autocomplete for the SAS
Are you up to date on your hotfixes for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1? If you're not certain of the answer, you'll find out next week when you might see this message appear: This version of SAS Enterprise Guide will expire on December 1st, 2010. If you've applied any SAS Enterprise
We've just pushed out the localized versions of the Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 tutorial. This is the tutorial that you'll see when you select Help->Getting Started Tutorial from within SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is a list of the supported languages, and links to the tutorial content: English
Question: Is there a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide? Answer: SAS Enterprise Guide is a 32-bit application, even with its most recent release. As such, it is still completely supported on any 64-bit Windows machine, but it runs in the 32-bit subsystem (also known as WoW64 – short for
I'm a computer geek -- much more comfortable behind a keyboard than in front of a camera. But I was glad to put on a nice shirt and visit the SAS video studio so that I could record this message for SAS customers: how does SAS R&D work to support
Robert Springborn has a special relationship with his SAS software. Like many long-time SAS users, Robert’s livelihood depends upon his advanced skills with SAS technology, as well as his analytical expertise. He’s been using SAS for over 28 years, which means when it comes to writing SAS programs, he’s comfortable
The SAS Talks series is a big hit, and now we've got a landing page where you can find previously recorded talks, plus information about upcoming talks. You can learn about SAS programming with SAS Enterprise Guide, ODS statistical graphics, fancy multi-sheet output for Microsoft Excel from SAS, and more!
Which versions of MySQL are supported by SAS 9.1.3 for Windows? Is the 64-bit version of Oracle 11g supported on the 64-bit version of SAS 9.2 on Linux? You can find the answers to these questions and others like it by consulting the SAS/ACCESS Validation Matrix: pick your SAS version,
Thanks to all of you who tuned in live for my first episode of SAS Talks. If you missed it, don't despair! We recorded it for you and you can watch it any time that you want. Even while I was presenting the talk, we had a panel of SAS
My most-visited blog post of 2009 discusses how SAS programmers can use SAS Enterprise Guide effectively. Next Thursday (17Dec2009), I'll be discussing this topic live in the next installment of the SAS Talks series. It's a webinar presentation, where you can listen to me talk, watch me demonstrate the software,
The SAS Web Report Studio discussion forum has seen some action lately. Got a question (or some answers)? Don't be shy - join the conversation! Here are a few of the interesting topics: Prompts and Prompts Values How to ask multiple choice questions in your reports. (Hint: the answer is
Update 10Jun2010: the most recent distributions of SAS 9.2 and SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 are now officially supported on Windows 7 (and have been for a while), and the details are in this SAS note. You can still use these instructions for interesting background information, but the install steps documented
When I said the release was imminent, I wasn't kidding. It's now available. With SAS 9.2 Maintenance 2 we now have support for Windows Server 2008 (in addition to what we already had for SAS 9.1.3). This 9.2 Maintenance release also has various fixes and improvements not only to the
I get this question all of the time on the discussion forum and this blog, so I feel I should help to spread the news. SAS now supports SAS 9.1.3 SP4 on Windows 2008 (32-bit edition). Here is the official statement. Update 07Oct2009: I changed this to indicate that the
At least, they will love us when they see that we've translated the SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 tutorial into Japanese and put it on the SAS support site. We've also got three flavors of Chinese (zh-TW, zh-CN, zh-HK) and Korean now available. These new editions join the Italian, German, Spanish,
I was recently reviewing our most popular samples that we publish on support.sas.com, and I came across this one showing unusual uses for the ROUND function. As well as gathering lots of visits, this sample has also earned a very respectable rating by you, the readers. I note that we
From SAS/ACCESS (for working with databases) to SAS/ZODIAC* (for cranking out horoscopes), you'll be able to learn all you need to know about SAS products with the new product pages on support.sas.com. As of today, we're featuring just a handful of popular products within these pages. The product pages serve
No, this is not about a super-expensive set of bed linens. It's about the 1000th thread (discussion topic) in the SAS Enterprise Guide discussion forum. This discussion forum began as a pilot program over two years ago, with SAS Enterprise Guide and ODS and Base Reporting among the first two
You know that game that people play with fortune cookie messages where you add a certain phrase to the end of the message to lend it a whole new meaning? Well, according to this announcement on our SAS support site, you'll be able to play that game with statements about
Recently our support site has raised awareness that SAS Enterprise Guide 2.0 (and related releases 2.05 and 2.1) will "expire" at the end of this year. If we wanted to learn how many customers are still using this release of software, this was an effective way to do it. We've
