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

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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Programming Tips

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 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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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 22, 2011 0

Next time, do your own homework

SAS programming is taught in schools all over the world, including in high schools.  Occasionally, I receive questions via my blog such as this one: Can somebody help me on this? Write a short DATA _NULL_ step to determine the largest integer you can store on your computer in 3,

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 19, 2011 0

Measuring the value of my DVD-by-mail movie service

Like millions of other Americans, I recently was asked to make a decision of tremendous importance to my household -- a decision that would affect the welfare of everyone in my family. That decision, of course, was whether to continue to receive Netflix movies by mail, or opt for the

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 19, 2011 0

Count the number of missing values for each variable

The other day I encountered a SAS Knowledge Base article that shows how to count the number of missing and nonmissing values for each variable in a data set. However, the code is a complicated macro that is difficult for a beginning SAS programmer to understand. (Well, it was hard

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Programming Tips

Waynette TubbsSeptember 15, 2011 0

Seven truths about metadata

Metadata is data about data. For the purposes of his NESUG 2011 presentation, Frank DiIorio defined metadata more precisely as data about data and data that describes workflow objects and processes. DiIorio wrote his paper because organizations are challenged more and more today to do more with less. Metadata can

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 15, 2011 0

Calling Windows PowerShell from SAS: a simple example

As I mentioned in my introductory post about Windows PowerShell, you can use PowerShell commands as a simple and concise method to collect data from your Windows systems -- information that is ripe for analysis within SAS. In this example, I'll show a technique for using a SAS program to

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Programming Tips

Waynette TubbsSeptember 12, 2011 0

Be the brightest light on the porch: Efficiency tips for programmers

Kathleen Harkins, Carolyn Maass and Mary Anne Rutkowski, from Merck Sharp and Dohme, collaborated to write T.I.P.S: Techniques and information for programming in SAS® for NESUG 2011. These three women are highly experienced programmers: Harkins has more than 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and aerospace industries; Maass has

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 7, 2011 0

Google Reader bundles for SAS-related blogs

I use Google Reader to keep up with SAS-related conversations on the blogosphere.   I thought it would be nice to share the lists of blogs that I follow as "shared bundles".  If you also use Google Reader, it will be very easy for you to add these bundles to

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinSeptember 7, 2011 0

Loops in SAS

Looping is essential to statistical programming. Whether you need to iterate over parameters in an algorithm or indices in an array, a loop is often one of the first programming constructs that a beginning programmer learns. Today is the first anniversary of this blog, which is named The DO Loop,

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 1, 2011 0

XCMD and SAS 9.3: working together again

It's been a well-known limitation for a long time.  When you connect to a SAS session using SAS Enterprise Guide, shell commands (including X command, SYSTASK, and FILENAME PIPE) are off-limits because the default SAS invocation disables them.  It does this by including -NOXCMD as a command-line option. This makes

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 30, 2011 0

Using 3rd party shape files to build map charts in SAS

While talking to SAS users in Australia earlier this month, I often demonstrated the capabilities of the new Map Chart task in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3. Creating map charts has never been easier: select your map data source, then select your response data source, and click Run. Voila! You've got

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 29, 2011 0

How to clear the output window in SAS 9.3

One of the highly visible changes in SAS 9.3 is the fact that the old LISTING destination is no longer the default destination for ODS output. Instead, the HTML destination is the default. One positive consequence of this is that ODS graphics and tables are interlaced in the output. Another

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinAugust 24, 2011 0

How to generate random numbers in SAS

You can generate a set of random numbers in SAS that are uniformly distributed by using the RAND function in the DATA step or by using the RANDGEN subroutine in SAS/IML software. (These same functions also generate random numbers from other common distributions such as binomial and normal.) The syntax

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 2, 2011 0

How to add HTMLBlue to your list of styles in SAS Enterprise Guide

One of the great innovations with SAS 9.3 is the focus on ODS statistical graphics. "Wait a minute," you're thinking, "weren't ODS graphics added in SAS 9.2?" Yes, that's true.  But with SAS 9.3 there is even more capability: more analytical SAS procedures support the graphs, and there are more

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 12, 2011 0

Computing age in SAS 9.3

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

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 11, 2011 0

How to assign a library to the same path as your SAS Enterprise Guide project

SAS Enterprise Guide sets values for several useful SAS macro variables when it connects to a SAS session, including one macro variable, &_CLIENTPROJECTPATH, that contains the name and path of the current SAS Enterprise Guide project file. (To learn about this and other macro variables that SAS Enterprise Guide assigns,

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 8, 2011 0

Frequently asked questions about SAS 9.3 and SAS Enterprise Guide

As I write this, SAS 9.3 has not yet been "shipped", but its release is imminent. I've already heard many questions about how SAS Enterprise Guide works with the new version, so I decided to write this "Frequently-soon-to-be-asked questions" document to help sort it out. What version of SAS Enterprise

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Programming Tips | Students & Educators

Chris HemedingerJuly 7, 2011 0

Are you too good for code reviews?

The recent issue of InformationWeek features a Q&A session with Ken Thompson, one of the creators of the Unix operating system. (He collaborated with Dennis Ritchie, of C language fame. Since much of SAS is written in C, I daresay there are a few copies of K&R around here.) One

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJune 25, 2011 0

Which tables contribute to that SAS information map?

About a year ago (wow, has it been that long?), I posted an example program that lets you report on the contents of a SAS information map. Using my example, you can see the data items, filters, and folder structure within a given information map. Last week a reader posted

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarJune 21, 2011 0

Is something missing or is it a ZERO?

As far as numbers go, the number zero is rather mysterious for data. Is it something or is it nothing? What happens when you have missing data but enter 0? This topic triggered an intriguing discussion in my recent Programming 2: Data Manipulation Techniques class. In this post I’d like

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJune 21, 2011 0

What SAS administrators should know about libraries, metadata, and SAS Enterprise Guide

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

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJune 17, 2011 0

How to use SAS DATA step to copy a file from anywhere

SAS-based processes are critical to many organizations, but sometimes the trickiest part of your job falls into one or both of these activities: Getting stuff from the outside world "into" SAS. (Once it's in SAS, as many of you know, the world is your oyster.) Getting the output of your

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMay 25, 2011 0

SAS Enterprise Guide options: my favorite 5

SAS Enterprise Guide has about 150 options that you can customize in the Tools->Options window. With each release, the development team adds a few more options that have been asked for by customers, and they rarely decommission any existing options. It's getting quite crowded on some of those options windows!

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMay 18, 2011 0

Behind the scenes: importing Excel files using SAS Enterprise Guide

I hope that the following statement is not too controversial...but here it goes: Microsoft Excel is not a database system. That is, I know that people do use it as a database, but it's not an application that supports the rigor and discipline of managing data in the same way

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMay 9, 2011 0

Calculating the number of working days between two dates

It's a simple task to use SAS to compute the number of weekdays between two dates. You can use the INTCK function with the WEEKDAY interval to come up with that number. diff = intck('WEEKDAY', start_date, end_date); If you want to compute the number of working days between two dates,

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMay 3, 2011 0

Using SAS Enterprise Guide to run programs in batch

SAS Enterprise Guide is best known as an interactive interface to SAS, but did you know that you can use it to run batch-style programs as well? SAS Enterprise Guide has always offered an automation object model, which allows you to use scripting languages (such as VBScript or Windows PowerShell)

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Programming Tips

Rick WicklinApril 27, 2011 0

Log transformations: How to handle negative data values?

The log transformation is one of the most useful transformations in data analysis. It is used as a transformation to normality and as a variance stabilizing transformation. A log transformation is often used as part of exploratory data analysis in order to visualize (and later model) data that ranges over

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