Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerFebruary 4, 2011 0

New Goodies for SAS Programmers: View it now

Millions of Americans will be gathering around the television this Sunday to watch Super Bowl XLV. They'll gather in bars and private homes, prepare billions of calories worth of snacks, and root for their favorite teams. But if you're looking for an alternate form of entertainment, why not watch "New

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarJanuary 24, 2011 0

Find your data pattern with Perl

Who doesn’t like bargains? I’m sure you will all agree that good quality at a next-to-nothing cost is irresistible. My recent Dollarama run had me ecstatic about the gloves that come in all colours, styles and sizes for just over a dollar. (Fact: big retail stores charge over 10 times

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJanuary 19, 2011 0

Who am I to judge?

Tomorrow I'll be taking a few hours away from work to build something important: the self-esteems of a handful of middle-school-aged children. I'm volunteering as a judge in a middle-school science fair. And even though I'm not a scientist ("computer science" isn't a category), I understand enough about physical science

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarJanuary 12, 2011 0

A new year’s resolution that sounds like more fun than a spinning class

Last December I taught a SAS Programming 1: Essentials class at Statistics Canada (Statcan). My class could barely contain their mirth while I valiantly struggled to find the semicolon on the French keyboard. Far cry from my first move to Canada (which is a bilingual country) and my excitement about

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJanuary 10, 2011 0

You asked for it: the Autoexec process flow

AUTOEXEC.SAS wasn't enough for you. Yes, it's a sure-fire way to run SAS statements (such as LIBNAME assignments or macro definitions) whenever you start your SAS session, but you found it has limitations when used in configurations with lots of users who connect with SAS Enterprise Guide. Limitations such as:

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerDecember 23, 2010 0

The SAS code formatter: more than a pretty face

A customer phoned up SAS Technical Support the other day with a problem. (Yes, that happens occasionally...) When he ran a certain program through SAS Enterprise Guide, the program didn't seem to complete and no results were returned. Here is a snippet of the program (modified a bit to make

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarDecember 22, 2010 0

Help! I need SAS syntax help but it vanished in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3!

Ever since I got SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3, my help is not really helping, meaning, I don’t see a lot of items listed when I type ‘filename’ under Index. As you showed us in class with SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2, I used to see lots of items in the Index.

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerDecember 17, 2010 0

SAS logs in Enterprise Guide: Where's the beef?

You might be too young to remember Clara Peller. She was the star of a series of fast-food burger commercials in the 1980s, in which she demanded meatier meals by shouting "Where's the beef?" at the pickup counter or drive-through window. Alas, the competitor restaurant meals were afflicted with "Fluffy

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarDecember 17, 2010 0

Five reasons to use the SAS DATA Step or PROC SQL

When I joined SAS Institute I had no knowledge of SAS. I studied, researched and practiced. The questions I asked would make even the most seasoned programmer blush a beetroot red! Those were an intense nine months—I’ll tell you more in a later post about the learning system at SAS

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Advanced Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinDecember 10, 2010 0

Converting between correlation and covariance matrices

Both covariance matrices and correlation matrices are used frequently in multivariate statistics. You can easily compute covariance and correlation matrices from data by using SAS software. However, sometimes you are given a covariance matrix, but your numerical technique requires a correlation matrix. Other times you are given a correlation matrix,

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerDecember 8, 2010 0

In-your-face SETINIT warnings, at a desktop near you

I connect to more SAS server environments than your average SAS user. In a given week, I probably run SAS Enterprise Guide connecting to at least five different Windows-based servers, a few Unix-based servers, and maybe even a z/OS machine as well. With that many SAS environments, I'm bound to

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Advanced Analytics | Programming Tips

Rick WicklinDecember 8, 2010 0

Computing covariance and correlation matrices

Sample covariance matrices and correlation matrices are used frequently in multivariate statistics. This post shows how to compute these matrices in SAS and use them in a SAS/IML program. There are two ways to compute these matrices: Compute the covariance and correlation with PROC CORR and read the results into

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Programming Tips

Catherine (Cat) TruxilloDecember 2, 2010 0

Weekday Morning Quick-trick: How to Score from PROC VARCLUS

Have you used multivariate procedures in SAS and wanted to save out scores? Some procedures, such as FACTOR, CANDISC, CANCORR, PRINCOMP, and others have an OUT= option to save scores to the input data set. However, to score a new data set, or to perform scoring with multivariate procedures that

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarNovember 29, 2010 0

How SAS engines can read a range of data in Excel

Japan has a superfast train called the Shinkansen. The first I heard of it was when my sister visited Japan on a scholarship. Engine-awestruck, we wanted a ride, but weren’t able to get to Japan. Nor, did we know the language. (With over 5000 kanjis, it took my sister 3

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Programming Tips

Mark StevensNovember 24, 2010 0

To INDEX or not to INDEX...

Recently, a certification candidate asked me about indexes and how SAS decides whether to use one or not.  I don't work with supper-large data sets and therefore haven't been overly concerned with efficient coding techniques and consequently had no idea what an index was. So off to SAS 9.2 online

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerNovember 24, 2010 0

Calculating the UTC offset in your SAS session

Update 25Nov2010: I've updated this example to correct the code so that it works correctly for positive UTC offsets. Thanks to Bruno Müller, my colleague at SAS, for finding my mistakes. One of my SAS colleagues was recently working on a project where she had to create reports that include

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerNovember 23, 2010 0

Five strategies to eliminate passwords from your SAS programs

Many people mistakenly assume that just because you want to use a SAS program to access a protected resource (such as a database table), you must include the credentials for the resource inside your program. Few things cause a database administrator to lose more sleep than coming across this within

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerNovember 22, 2010 0

Process Explorer: tools for the SAS admin on Windows

It was over two years ago that I shared the tip of using Process Explorer to look under the covers at which SAS processes were running on your Windows environment. Process Explorer recently received a refresh, and it's worth downloading the new version. (Yes, it's free.) If you want to

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Programming Tips

SAS JediNovember 19, 2010 0

Jedi SAS Tricks: Custom PDF Bookmarks

I was building a nice little PDF report the other day.  I love the way ODS PDF replicates the SAS Results window navigation structure as PDF bookmarks, but... I'd much rather write the text for the bookmarks myself.  So, I decided to "use the SAS" and make ODS do my

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Programming Tips

Mike KaltNovember 19, 2010 0

Why Can't SAS Read My CSV file?

Many SAS users receive data in the form of CSV (Comma Separated Value) files, and need to convert them to SAS data sets. A typical record in a CSV file might look like this: Jeter,Derek,1995,,234,”22,600,000” Note the following about the record above: There is no data for the fourth field,

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerNovember 16, 2010 0

Look before you buy: peek at your data details before opening

Are you afraid of big commitments? Do you like to shop around thoroughly before making a purchase decision? I can't help you with most of Life's Big Choices, but I can help you in one way: I can show you how to learn more about your data set before you

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerNovember 10, 2010 0

An "Enterprise Guide" in a parallel universe

Dear Readers, You might visit this blog for many reasons, chief among them to learn useful information about SAS. You know that I often post tips about SAS Enterprise Guide, and sometimes people go so far as to call this a "SAS Enterprise Guide" blog*. But for all of the

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Learn SAS | Programming Tips

Charu ShankarNovember 4, 2010 0

SAS—your wish is my command

I love to teach SAS programming and in this blog, I hope to share best practices, tips, tricks and answer some frequently asked questions by our SAS users. I’m constantly learning more nuances of SAS and more programming languages like SQL. Why the interest in language? As you probably know,

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerNovember 3, 2010 0

Peek at your data using VBScript, OLE DB, and the SAS local data provider

Let's pretend for a moment that you don't have SAS installed on all of your office computers. But you've got some great content locked away inside SAS data sets. Is there a way to get to the content of that data, without having to push the data through a SAS

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 27, 2010 0

SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1: it's not dead yet

Are you up to date on your hotfixes for SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1? If you're not certain of the answer, you'll find out next week when you might see this message appear: This version of SAS Enterprise Guide will expire on December 1st, 2010. If you've applied any SAS Enterprise

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 25, 2010 0

SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 Tutorials in your language

We've just pushed out the localized versions of the Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 tutorial. This is the tutorial that you'll see when you select Help->Getting Started Tutorial from within SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is a list of the supported languages, and links to the tutorial content: English

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 22, 2010 0

PROC REPORT versus TABULATE: two SAS heavyweights

The question came up on the SAS Enterprise Guide discussion forum: which do you prefer, List Report Wizard (PROC REPORT) or Summary Tables (PROC TABULATE)? And as with most SAS-related questions, the proper response is: "it depends." If you put these two PROCs in the ring with a Google Fight,

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 9, 2010 0

World Statistics, FTW!

Yesterday, I was in the #raganSAS audience as David Pogue told me What's New and What's Next in the world of technology. David is a great presenter, and he really had the audience engaged as he talked about augmented reality, his world according to Twitter, and an iPhone app that

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 8, 2010 0

Tuning your Windows 2008 environment for SAS

If you're an administrator of systems that run SAS, you have probably already read up on How to Maintain Happy SAS 9 Users. If not, go read that first. Now, are you looking to squeeze the best performance out of SAS on Microsoft Windows 2008 Server? Be sure to read

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 1, 2010 0

Export to Excel 2007/2010 using SAS Enterprise Guide

Since its 4.2 release, SAS Enterprise Guide has been able to import Microsoft Excel 2007 and 2010 spreadsheet files (usually encountered as .XLSX files). But while SAS Enterprise Guide can export XLS files (which are compatible with all versions of Microsoft Excel), it does not have the ability to export

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