Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts
SHA256 and other hash functions are supported in SAS 9.4 and SAS Viya. It's better than MD5 as a cryptographic hash!
Every day of the year is an official 'national day' for something - here's a SAS chart to help you find which bizarre 'national day' falls on your birthday! I recently read an article that lists weird and unconventional national days. It was very interesting, but I found the data
When you create maps, you are typically plotting data for analytics -- but you can also use SAS to create 'pretty' maps for background decorations (for posters, slides, presentations, etc). This blog shows you a few examples... A few years ago I noticed that the CNN Situation Room had a decorative
Because I began my SAS career in the Publications division, I like to think that I have a keen eye when it comes to SAS documentation. When I first visited the SAS 9.4 online documentation, I immediately noticed that it had a different look. Examine the image below; can you
My children learned this skill early in life: when you want to secure permission for a questionable activity (say, "watch 5 hours of Phineas and Ferb" or "eat a bowl of candy for breakfast"), you should approach the most lenient adult in the household. In my early days of fatherhood,
The farther you try to forecast into the future, the less certain you are -- how can you represent that graphically? One way is to draw a shaded/colored "confidence interval" around your forecast line, but this is something a lot of SAS users have trouble with. That's why I decided to create
Being so close before Christmas I thought it would be a good idea to see what route Santa Claus is planning this year. Not just because I'm living in Australia and Santa usually comes in t-shirts & shorts but also because it's a long way to get down here. So
The holiday season is here, and you're probably wondering how to shop for that picky SAS Enterprise Guide user on your gift list. I've got a few ideas for you, and the price is right! Here are links to 11 custom tasks that are free to download, easy to install,
I decided this year to get serious about my running. I started recording my distance for every run. I made a SAS data set and generated simple reports. After a few weeks, I set a goal of averaging one marathon a week (3.8 miles per day, 26.2 miles per week,
Microsoft Windows 8 has been with us for a year, and its first major update -- Windows 8.1 -- has just arrived. So how does SAS support these Windows 8 platforms? The answer can be found on support.sas.com in SAS Note 46876. I'll summarize it here: SAS 9.3 and SAS
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)
Okay, given the title of this article, I might be overselling the content a bit. Read on to see if your life will be transformed. I've just returned from SESUG, and this question came up during one of the presentations. While this tip might seem basic, it was news to
Stick to the basics. Did you ever get that advice? Two of the papers at MidWest SAS Users Group 2013 used that most fundamental of SAS processing concepts—the Program Data Vector—to show why users might encounter unexpected errors in their DATA step programs. In The Secret Life of DATA STEP,
This graph certainly makes it clear! I can see right through your lies! Clearly, you know what you're talking about! We need more transparency in our organization! What was that all about, you might ask?!? ... I was just getting all the obvious puns out of the way, so I
A challenge for statistical programmers is getting data into the right form for analysis. For graphing or analyzing data, sometimes the "wide format" (each subject is represented by one row and many variables) is required, but other times the "long format" (observations for each subject span multiple rows) is more
The other day I showed how to check your data cardinality by using a simple SAS program. I also promised to provide a custom task that makes the process even easier within SAS Enterprise Guide. Today I'm delivering on that promise. I've just added the custom task to the support.sas.com
Although the NSA and news media have given metadata a bad name in the popular press, the fact remains that information about the nature of your data is extremely valuable. For example, I posted an article yesterday about data cardinality. Cardinality measures the uniqueness of values in a variable. Cardinality
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
Traditionally, SAS users like their processes to behave like Ron Popeil's famous rotisserie: they want to set it and forget it. That's the definition of a batch process. You work like heck to get it ready to run, then you push the button (or schedule it) and walk away. But
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
Your biggest problem with maps used to be learning how to fold a paper road map. Today, with the advent of GPS, Google Maps, and location-specific data, the bar has been raised! ... you now need to know how to plot your data on a map! Below are several examples of different kinds
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
There's an old expression "easy as pie." Have you ever tried to bake a pie??? ... It's not so easy, LOL! And neither is using pie charts correctly! :) Below are several examples of different kinds of pie charts you can create with SAS/GRAPH. And at the bottom of this
Do you know how to create a bar chart using SAS, and when to use what kind of bar chart?!? If the answer doesn't come to you "easy as pie" then this blog is for you! Below are several examples of different kinds of bar charts you can create with SAS/GRAPH.
It's been almost 5 years since I posted one of the first custom tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide. It was a task that made it easier to convert SPSS data files into SAS data sets. Like many projects that begin as custom tasks, this one later became a feature in
Do you know (right off the top of your head) the simple SAS/GRAPH code you would use to create line graphs? ... If not, then this tutorial is for you! A line plot is basically a scatter plot where the markers are connected. A line plot should only be used
Scatter plots are probably the simplest kind of graph, and provide a great way to visually look for relationships between two variables. But, do you know (right off the top of your head) the simple SAS/GRAPH code you would use to create them? ... This tutorial leads you step-by-step through the
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
If you're a software developer, you're probably already familiar with these terms: I18N and L10N. Internationalization (I + 18 letters + N = I18N) The discipline of preparing your software to run correctly in different languages with different culture settings. For example, the software must be able to accommodate multibyte
With the release of SAS 9.4 (which included SAS/STAT 12.3 and SAS Enterprise Guide 6.1), you might seriously consider hiring a Chief Versions Officer (CVO). Fortunately, most of the recent versions of SAS Enterprise Guide work with the different recent versions of SAS, so you have some flexibility as you
