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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerDecember 16, 2011 0

A SAS options viewer for SAS Enterprise Guide

On the heels of the release of the popular SAS macro variable viewer from last month, I'm providing another custom task that I hope will prove just as useful. This one is a SAS options viewer, similar in concept to the OPTIONS window in SAS display manager. You can download

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallDecember 8, 2011 0

Building custom measures for OLAP cubes

In one minute (and 10 seconds, but are you measuring that?) you can add a custom measure (also known as calculated members) to your OLAP cube. Watch this video to create a simple calculation multiplying units * price. Remember that this mechanism is not just used for multiplications, you can

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarDecember 7, 2011 0

Mmm... Dr. G and the M&Ms

“Do you really serve M&Ms every Wednesday? Tell us the story!” clamored a wide-eyed class after sampling the M&Ms lighting up the breakout area. Seeing how hard they worked on their exercises, it seemed ok to have a slight diversion from technology. Besides as you’ll find out, the story has

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Dropping into the abyss of Detail Data

Angela HallDecember 5, 2011 0

OLAP users can fall into the abyss of detail data

OLAP cube developers might have noticed that the amount of time required to generate any aggregation (including the NWAY) can negatively impact their productivity. Developers remove the NWAY aggregation (following the sample screens in a prior post) to significantly reduce build time and allow quick modifications to the cube definition.

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerNovember 30, 2011 0

Just-in-time data prep in SAS Enterprise Guide

On this blog, I've delivered a few tips about using SAS formats to stratify your data values "in place" without having to actually change your data. The most recent example addressed date and datetime variables. My previous examples included simple SAS programs that you can run in SAS display manager

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Programming Tips

SASHELP.Iris Data Set

SAS JediNovember 18, 2011 0

Jedi SAS Tricks: Building a Name Suffix variable list

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

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerNovember 17, 2011 0

Take SAS program editor abbreviations to the next level

Rick posted a tip today about using abbreviations in the SAS program editor window (often referred to as the "enhanced editor"). Defining abbreviations is a great way to save keystrokes and re-use "templates" of code that you've squirreled away. (One of Rick's readers also picked up on the tip, and

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerNovember 15, 2011 0

Do you mind if we dance with your DATEs (or DATETIMEs)?

I've been working with date-time data on a recent project, and I've come across a few SAS programs that have "opportunity for improvement" when it comes time to create reports. (Or maybe I haven't, and I contrived this entire blog post so that I could reference one of my favorite

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallNovember 9, 2011 0

Limit the number of drill-through to detail records available from OLAP cubes

Drill-through to detail is the ability to right click within a cell of a web report or OLAP viewer and request the detail source records that make up that specific cell's measure. The maximum number of records, by default, is set to 300,000. Feasibly the report user could download all

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Student posters at Analytics 2011

Anne-Lindsay BeallNovember 7, 2011 0

Seven steps for avoiding (data) hangovers

In a production environment, where dozens of SAS programs are run in sequence, often monthly or quarterly, and where logs can span thousands of lines, it’s easy to overlook the small stuff that can cause data hangovers. Recognize any of these? A temporary data set finds its way into subsequent

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarNovember 3, 2011 0

Retail therapy the SAS way

It’s mid-afternoon. Day 2 of the PRG2 class. Students return satiated from lunch. Some slipped into this course without taking PRG1 so they missed out on some basics. I’m trying to explain how SAS thinks. I use slides, draw pix, do everything except break into dance to get their attention.

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerNovember 2, 2011 0

Using Windows PowerShell to report on your SAS Enterprise Guide project files

This blog post is a "mashup" of a couple of my previous posts, combining the lessons to create something brand new that I hope you will find useful. First, let's review what we know: SAS Enterprise Guide supports a scriptable object model, which allows you to write scripts or programs

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallNovember 1, 2011 0

Adding format catalogs without losing others

As I mentioned when creating a user-defined format for Information Maps in a prior post custom or user-defined formats can be created and stored quickly in the default format catalog for all Business Intelligence products within "Lev1SASAppSASEnvironmentSASFormats". This is useful for custom sorting, reclassifying or grouping data as well as

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallOctober 27, 2011 0

Revisiting the starting file location for Enterprise Guide

Years ago and a seemingly far galaxy away, I wrote about how to modify 9.1.3 to start Enterprise Guide users in a different location for the File folder. By default, the user only can access their personal SAS Temporary File. Why change this? I would prefer to use a central

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Anne-Lindsay BeallOctober 25, 2011 0

SAS Data Step Debugger: Your liberator from logic errors

“I really wish someone had shown me this function in SAS sooner, because it’s saved me a ton of time and effort,” said Brandi Rhoads as she opened her presentation at the Western Users of SAS Software (WUSS) conference in San Francisco.

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallOctober 25, 2011 0

Promoting SAS BI Dashboard content

If you are unable to export BI Dashboard Content the BI Dashboard Logical types was not installed on the system running SAS Management Console. Update this by following these steps Run the software install from the SAS Depot (mine is located at C:SAS Software Depotsetup.exe) Select ‘Install Additional Software’ Then

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Service Window vs Batch Script

Angela HallOctober 21, 2011 0

Become super-efficient at starting & stopping services via scripting

Which would you rather do? Click stop (or start) over and over, while waiting in between the services to make sure everything is up and running ... OR ... click one button and go have lunch? Honestly I prefer the lunch option. (And for administrators, the quickest option is always

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallOctober 18, 2011 0

Troubleshooting a web file upload

Functionality to upload files onto the SAS server (from 9.2 on) is available using stored processes and an html input type="file". I introduced this topic last year in my blog post using the SAS Stored Process Developer Guide sample. Of course, it is never as easy as the sample is

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Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallOctober 12, 2011 0

Dynamic dashboard ranges - its all in the data

Business Problem: The traffic lighting (red/green/yellow) range is different for one group/category than the others but the indicator needs to include all group values. Recommendation: It's all in the data. Here is an example. For the Candy_Sales_Summary data (located in the EG Sample Data folder) there are three groups of

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarOctober 12, 2011 0

Bad words in SAS - PG rating

Picture this – a student grabs the Programming 1 textbook, scans it quickly seemingly searching for something specific, and shakes his head indicating an unsuccessful search. He plants himself smack dab in the front row, looks me squarely in the eye, raises one eyebrow quizzically and says, “Bad words?” I

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerOctober 10, 2011 0

10 tips for organizing your SAS Enterprise Guide projects

What is the best way to organize your SAS work in a SAS Enterprise Guide project? There are no project templates or enforced structure, really, but isn't there a best practice? I don't have a single prescription for the best project organization. I believe that it depends on the nature

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerOctober 5, 2011 0

Netflix streaming: Making every minute count

It turns out that I'm not receiving the maximum potential value from my Netflix streaming service. Perhaps it's because I place too much value on sleep. With my monthly subscription, I am permitted to view Netflix content 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In my house I have

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Programming Tips

Waynette TubbsOctober 3, 2011 0

Five easy steps to write your presentation in SAS®

Most SUG presentations are written in PowerPoint – they may even be written in Word first, and then fancied up a bit in PowerPoint – but they are rarely written in SAS. But Louise Hadden, from Abt Associates Inc, had a need to produce a lot of PDF presentations. She

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Programming Tips

Rounding up and rounding down in SAS

Rick WicklinOctober 3, 2011 0

Rounding up, rounding down

SAS has several ways to round a number to an integer. You can round a number up, round it down, or round it to the nearest integer. If your data contain both positive and negative values, you can also round numbers toward zero, or away from zero. The functions that

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallSeptember 29, 2011 0

Updating your global style

Every six months or so I try to find a recent picture that captures who I am and what I am feeling. Loading this into my various social/online profiles in Twitter, SAS Community, Forums, LinkedIn, corporate internal, Facebook etc then take me a bit of time to implement. Wouldn't it

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarSeptember 28, 2011 0

A man called Bloom and my take on him

Wondering about Bloom and what he has to do with SAS programming. For any learner, he is someone to respect. For anyone wishing to learn more about the levels of the learning process, this is the master. Bloom classified cognitive, a big word for thinking skills, into 6 broad categories.

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerSeptember 28, 2011 0

Jumping into Windows 7 Jump Lists

Filed under "Little changes that you probably didn't notice". When Microsoft introduced Windows 7 to the desktop, one of the many usability features that they added were "Jump Lists". Jump Lists serve as a sort of shortcut to not just open an application, but "jump right in" to a particular

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Programming Tips

Chris Hemedinger

Chris HemedingerSeptember 26, 2011 0

The default settings are not good enough

Today, I came across this article that discusses how software users rarely change the settings in the applications that they use. Users assume that the software vendor sets the default values as they are for a reason, and who are they to set them otherwise? I'm a software developer (and

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarSeptember 23, 2011 0

Few of my favourite things - SAS informats

Australian merino wool sweaters, Russian watches, Swiss chocolate, Chinese silk blouses, Canadian country music, American sweatshirts, English knitting patterns, Californian pistachios, French muesli, Egyptian bracelets, Scottish kilts, the list goes on. Was I born in a king’s family? Not really, much as I’d like to think of my dad as

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Advanced Analytics | Data Visualization | Programming Tips

Angela HallSeptember 22, 2011 0

Link to a specific section of Web Report Studio

If you would like to link users to a specific section within a Web Report Studio report, there is a quick way to generate the URL. Just send yourself an email from Web Report Studio. A parameter &rsTS is included in the link which corresponds to the specific section selected.

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