“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” We all remember that famous quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and can probably relate to it. In the chaos of trying to find time for everything life throws at you
My oh my… It makes me happy to see that most of our blog readers have been very good this year. You know, the elves have been especially busy keeping track of predicting the probability that you will be naughty or nice. This really cuts down on the last minute
“Dear Cat, In a repeated measures drug study, I am unsure what to do with the baseline measurement. Since it is one of the time points in my study, I feel like I should use it as one of the dependent variable measurements. But I have seen analyses where baseline
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
SAS 9.4 allows you to create html5 output with your graph inline (as part of the html), providing a great way to email your SAS/Graph output! Previously, if you used ods html and dev=png to create graphs, you had to deal with two files -- a png file (containing the graph)
This robin chick chirped away in my backyard on a glorious summer afternoon. While papa robin hovered above, the chick hopped on ground following Dad. Soon Dad disappeared after leading the chick to a tree where two gray squirrels smacked their lips at the sight of an easy lunch. Lifting
With the medical science these days, there are many genetic defects you can be tested for, to see if you might develop a certain problem/disease, or might be a carrier for it. Would you rather know, or not know? (Would your health insurance company rather know, or not know?) These
In previous versions of SAS, if you wanted to experiment with creating U.S. maps in Proc GMAP, there wasn't any good sample data available. Unless you had your own data available, you probably ended up using the maps.us x/y points as your DATA= ... which is sort of a nonsense
How do you like your sandwich? On rye, whole wheat or white bread? What fillings and dressings do you like? You probably think I’ve gone completely crazy and I don’t blame you. What does food have to do with SAS, you say? Loads -- as you’ll find out with this
ODS graph styles provide users with an easy way to control things such as the colors and fonts used in a graph, freeing the user from having to specify these properties in their code. A lot of thought was given to picking colors that work well together, and look good. The
To say that I'm excited about the SAS 9.4 release is an understatement! For example, did you know that in SAS 9.4, you can write SAS/Graph output directly to a Powerpoint slide?!? This is definitely an item that was on my "wish list," and will no doubt make life a
Not everyone agrees on a definition of "big data" -- but you'll probably agree that the amount of data available today is a lot bigger than in the past, eh?!? ... so let's just call it "Bigger Data"! :) And you might have noticed that some of your old tried-and-true
Over the holidays I was having a discussion with my cat, Ms. Trixie Lou. A question that often arises during the first programming class is the following: how do I find the variables that are in common to these two or three data sets? As it turns out, Ms. Trixie
Wondering why technology is such a big deal and why working with SAS will be in demand forever? The great blackout of Toronto in 2003 proved that so well. We could barely survive without electricity for a whole day. While breakdowns make us acutely aware of our dependence, technology also
When working with "big data" you usually have too many points to view in a plot, and end up subsetting or summarizing the data. But now, in SAS 9.3, you have an alternative! For example, the following scatter plot of 10,000+ points is just a visual "blob": But using a new
In the previous episode, we built our own custom SAS function - a masterful trick indeed. Gordon Keener, a developer here at SAS, responded exuberantly "You think that's cool? - try THIS!" and proceeded to demonstrate prodigious powers with the SAS by using a custom function in a custom informat
A SAS user (who lives in the the US) emailed me a question about SAS functions. He was reading UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) datetime values from server logs, and to make future calculations and comparisons easier, he wanted to transform the value to local datetime. The INTNX() function worked great, but
The 25 boys I teach on Sundays loved these cupcakes I baked for them for Easter… the sugared peeps had them completely satisfied. I love my tea or coffee laced with sugar. I think you‘d all agree that it is always more pleasant to meet a nice customer service person
In the Star Wars movie, Obi-wan could just wave his hand, mutter a few words, and the stormtroopers would "move along". How the power of the Force makes ridding yourself of problematic characters so much easier! I recently was invited to become an alternate instructor for Ron Cody’s SAS Business
If you’ve taken one of my SAS classes you may recall “Mark’s 3 rules of programming”, the first of which is “Lazy programmers are GOOD programmers.” One of the things I love about best about SAS programming is the plethora of functions and shortcuts built into the language, all designed
Have you used multivariate procedures in SAS and wanted to save out scores? Some procedures, such as FACTOR, CANDISC, CANCORR, PRINCOMP, and others have an OUT= option to save scores to the input data set. However, to score a new data set, or to perform scoring with multivariate procedures that
Japan has a superfast train called the Shinkansen. The first I heard of it was when my sister visited Japan on a scholarship. Engine-awestruck, we wanted a ride, but weren’t able to get to Japan. Nor, did we know the language. (With over 5000 kanjis, it took my sister 3
I was building a nice little PDF report the other day. I love the way ODS PDF replicates the SAS Results window navigation structure as PDF bookmarks, but... I'd much rather write the text for the bookmarks myself. So, I decided to "use the SAS" and make ODS do my
Many SAS users receive data in the form of CSV (Comma Separated Value) files, and need to convert them to SAS data sets. A typical record in a CSV file might look like this: Jeter,Derek,1995,,234,”22,600,000” Note the following about the record above: There is no data for the fourth field,
