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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Programming Tips

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

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 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 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

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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Programming Tips

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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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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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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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 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 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

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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