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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallOctober 15, 2012 0

Go on a date with SAS BI Dashboard, part 2

Last week I provided the steps for how to go on a date, at least by using dynamic prompts in BI Dashboard. Now that you have seen how to create them, lets discuss making them smarter. For this example, the customer is asking for two prompts to affect a single

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Programming Tips

Lise CragenOctober 10, 2012 0

On the Roadshow again

Program update for 2013! The SAS Training Roadshow is back on tour. This year, we’re heading out to six rockin’ cities. We’d love to see you there. Cleveland - Portland - San Jose - Indianapolis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ As I prepare for my stint on the SAS Programming "Roadshow," it occurs to

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerOctober 9, 2012 0

Special automatic macro variables available in SAS Enterprise Guide

You might know about the many automatic macro variables that are available in SAS. They provide plenty of information about the SAS environment, such as the current user (SYSUSERID), the SAS version (SYSVER and SASVLONG), and the operating system where SAS is running (SYSCP and SYSCPL). That information is often

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallOctober 8, 2012 0

Go on a date with SAS BI Dashboard, part 1

Don't give up on the dating game. Just because there is no prompt type specifically for dates, it can still be accomplished with some stored process matchmaking. BI Dashboard offers a dynamic prompt indicator which provides the ultimate flexibility in developing prompt based reports and dashboards. The dynamic prompt indicator

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Programming Tips

Robert AllisonOctober 5, 2012 0

Custom SAS graphs = competitive advantage

SAS/GRAPH gives you the ability to customize your graphs (or even create totally new types of custom graphs) ... and it is my firm belief that it gives you a competitive advantage by allowing you to "make sense" of your data in ways your competitors can't. Most of the examples in

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarOctober 1, 2012 0

Three must have SAS freebies

"I want everything!" said a student when I paused to ask my SAS Programming 1 class what else they wanted to learn. Seriously! You want me to share everything I know in three days? The student came back with... "Well okay, what about those freebies you mentioned?" That’s how it all

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Programming Tips

Robert AllisonSeptember 26, 2012 0

Adding pop-up graphs to your SAS/GRAPHs

By now, most of you probably already know how to add drill downs and hover text to your SAS graphs. But did you know you can add pop-up images and graphs? Here are a couple of examples ... In this first example, when you hover your mouse over each state, you

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Programming Tips

Miss SAS AnswersSeptember 19, 2012 0

Selecting the Second Duplicate Observation

Dear Miss SAS Answers, I have read through a few Dear Miss SAS Answers blog posts, but I cannot seem to find what I am looking for. I need to extract only the second duplicate from a whole list of duplicates per account number. Is there a way to

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerSeptember 18, 2012 0

HAVING (clause) fun with SAS Enterprise Guide

Last week I attended a meeting of the Toronto Area SAS Society. (Okay, I didn't just attend; I was a presenter as well.) This user group meeting contained a feature that I had never seen before: "Solutions to the Posed Problem". Weeks before the meeting, an "open problem" was posted

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonSeptember 18, 2012 0

It be "International Talk Like a Pirate" day - Arrr!!!

Avast Mateys! Did you know that International Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up?!? (September 19) Here's the official website, if you'd like more info. And what better way to get into the spirit of things than to use SAS/GRAPH to plot some real pirate data - Arrrr!!! Here's

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallSeptember 17, 2012 0

Always learning something new, two awesome Enterprise Guide tricks

Who says anyone is an expert at something? I definitely do not when it comes to SAS (well, anything for that matter). Each time I sit through a presentation at a conference I learn something new. During the SAS Western Users Conference, fondly know as WUSS, this month I learned

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallSeptember 12, 2012 0

Defining a custom color palette for BI Dashboard bar charts

Out of the box, the simple bar graph uses the same color for each bar. A frequent request from users is to define a standard color palette for the dashboard indicators so distinct bars are the same color in each indicator or from refresh to refresh. With most dashboard tricks,

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerAugust 31, 2012 0

The case for XCMD privileges in SAS Enterprise Guide

One of the often-cited side effects of moving from "Base SAS" (SAS on your PC, or Display Manager) to SAS Enterprise Guide is the loss of "X" command privileges -- that is, the ability for your SAS programs to invoke other programs via the operating system shell. We call this

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarAugust 30, 2012 0

Why SAS skills are more in demand than ever before

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

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerAugust 22, 2012 0

Using a regular expression to validate a SAS variable name

Regular expressions provide a powerful method to find patterns in a string of text. However, the syntax for regular expressions is somewhat cryptic and difficult to devise. This is why, by my reckoning, approximately 97% of the regular expressions used in code today were copied and pasted from somewhere else.

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerAugust 15, 2012 0

Comparing data set schemas in SAS

The project that I'm currently working on requires several input data tables, and those tables must have a specific schema. That is, each input table must contain columns of a specific name, type, and length in order for the rest of the system to function correctly. The schema requirements aren't

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerAugust 14, 2012 0

How to get your SAS data set attributes into Excel

I'm working on a SAS programming project with a large team. Each team member is responsible for a piece of the overall system, and the "contract" for how it all fits together is The Data. For example, I've got a piece that performs some data manipulation and produces several output

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallAugust 8, 2012 0

Testing recommendations for SAS BI Dashboard & SAS Web Report Studio

With limited time and budget, you can still thoroughly test SAS reports built in SAS BI Dashboard and SAS Web Report Studio by considering how all the tools were used to build the end report. An understanding of the functionality within each part of the chain from raw data to

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Robert AllisonJuly 31, 2012 0

Visualizing evidence of a black hole, with a gif animation

Hopefully you know that a gif animation can be used for more than just showing a cartoon animal doing cute tricks! Being a savvy data-meister, I'm sure you are also aware that you can use gif animations to see how data changes over time. But perhaps you didn't know you could

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJuly 30, 2012 0

How to get the statistics you need from SAS Enterprise Guide

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

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJuly 16, 2012 0

Listing the data sets in a library within your custom task

A SAS Professionals attendee and Twitter follower named Marco asks for help: ..struggling to find a method with custom tasks in EG to be able to list the datasets in a library, can you help please? Sure, no problem. This is easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. First, make sure that you have a reference

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJuly 6, 2012 0

Counting how many times a web link has been shared on Twitter or Facebook

Update 24Nov2015: The methods in this post no longer work for Twitter, as Twitter has discontinued support for its "share count" API that was used within the Twitter share buttons. But the Facebook method still works, and I've described a method for counting LinkedIn shares on another post. As of

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Programming Tips

Waynette TubbsJune 26, 2012 0

How to mimic the N function for character variables using Data Step, PROC SQL

Many of you know Mike Zdeb. He's a long-time SAS user and frequent presenter at SAS conferences. Zdeb is also a reviewer of many SAS Press books and author of his own SAS book, Maps Made Easy Using SAS. Zdeb contacted me after he read the May SAS Tech Report

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 21, 2012 0

Use OLAP data sources from SAS Stored Processes

So are you now dreaming big? Coming up with other ideas for how SAS Stored Processes can be leveraged in your installation of SAS? As I mentioned in last week's post, you could use OLAP cubes as a data source for your SAS Stored Process. Here is how I would

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Programming Tips

Sunil GuptaJune 20, 2012 0

Something for nothing? Adding group descriptive statistics

Can you actually get something for nothing? With PROC SQL’s subquery and remerging features, yes, you can. Often there is a need to add group descriptive statistics such as group counts, minimum and maximum values for further by-group processing. Instead of first creating the group count, minimum or maximum values

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 20, 2012 0

I have doubts

One of my new work friends says this frequently. But the statement is lost in his translation from Portuguese, it is not that he does not believe me, it is just that he has questions about how things happen so he can learn. I debate on which version of this

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 18, 2012 0

Code wizards make the magic happen

Wizard Harry Potter makes magic just waving his wand around and shouting out spells. Using SAS Enterprise Guide (and you are welcome to shout out your own commands too) you can create some magic, allowing the Stored Process Wizard to code for you. On Step 2, the "Include code for"

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 15, 2012 0

And the difference between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics is ...

After some discussion with SAS Product Marketing yesterday, we devised this response to everyone's question about the Business Analytic differentiator that SAS provides. ********************************************************************************************************* Business Intelligence is one of the key components from SAS that ties into a suite of analytic techniques, information handling and performance infrastructures needed to deliver

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerJune 14, 2012 0

Read a Microsoft datetime value into a SAS datetime value

A colleague was recently working with a web service that supplies some datetime values using the Microsoft Windows internal representation. He called the web service to retrieve those values (along with other data) from SAS, and he needed convert these values to SAS date-time values. The Microsoft definition for a

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallJune 14, 2012 0

Any SAS program can become a SAS Stored Process

Questions (or search strings) lead people to my blog or my email box on a daily basis and many of these are related to what SAS Stored Processes can or cannot do. Can a SAS Stored Process query an RDBMS? Can a SAS Stored Process create a data table? Could

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