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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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 29, 2010 0

What to do IN BETWEEN dates

I saw a suggestion arrive from a SAS customer who would like to see the IN operator extended to allow ranges of date values. For example, you can currently write a program that checks for values IN a collection or range of numbers: data check; if x in (1:10) then

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Programming Tips | SAS Events

Chris HemedingerSeptember 28, 2010 0

Get Smart!

AnnMaria wrote her latest blog post, "SAS Enterprise Guide makes you smarter", partly in response to my recent post about whether it's making you stupider. From the contents of her program example, I'm guessing that she's preparing for WUSS in November. I don't get to attend this year, but my

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 16, 2010 0

A 64-bit success story: JMP

In my post yesterday about the 64-bit hype and how client apps like SAS Enterprise Guide would see only a limited boost from a 64-bit version, I forgot to point out another offering from SAS that has embraced the 64-bit architecture: JMP. JMP offers a 64-bit version, and it makes

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 15, 2010 0

Should you care about 64-bit applications?

Question: Is there a 64-bit version of SAS Enterprise Guide? Answer: SAS Enterprise Guide is a 32-bit application, even with its most recent release. As such, it is still completely supported on any 64-bit Windows machine, but it runs in the 32-bit subsystem (also known as WoW64 – short for

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 14, 2010 0

Is SAS Enterprise Guide making you stupid?

Have you ever visited a city for the first time and, instead of relying maps to plan your journey, you simply plug your destinations into a GPS device and mindlessly follow the navigation directions? You've just cheated yourself out of a learning opportunity, because planning the journey and using your

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 1, 2010 0

Live long and prosper using PROC REG

The secret to long life is good genes, right? This publication titled "Joint influence of small-effect genetic variants on human longevity" showed up on my Google alerts, and from what I can read (all of it) and understand (very little of it), that assertion is true. The researchers used PROC

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 31, 2010 0

SAS Enterprise Guide 4.3 is available

Shane and others have already discovered this. The new version of SAS Enterprise Guide is now available. The latest version offers tremendous enhancements for all users, especially SAS programmers. It includes a new SAS program editing environment that supports syntax suggestions and autocomplete, embedded syntax reference help, and a SAS

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 10, 2010 0

Talking in my sleep

I've completed my first day of teaching a two-day course about SAS Enterprise Guide. I'm in Sydney, Australia...but my biological clock is still tuned into Cary, North Carolina time. I woke up at 1 a.m. today and even though I tried to convince my body that it was still time

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 3, 2010 0

A winter term at Hemedinger U.

I received this offer in the post the other day: "University apparel just for you, featuring the name HEMEDINGER!" Yes, the offer has it correct. This would be just for me, because I can't think of anyone else who might order it. I regret that I didn't receive the offer

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 26, 2010 0

Job security through code obscurity

Art Carpenter offers tremendous advice to SAS programmers who want to maximize their job security: make your programs impossible for others to read and understand. In his published papers, Art (in his tongue-in-cheek manner) presents practical examples for how to accomplish this. I'm afraid that with our new code formatter

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 14, 2010 0

Hope for ugly programs

Have you ever inherited a SAS program from a "gifted" SAS programmer? By "gifted", I mean a person who regards line feeds and white space as a waste of precious bytes, who knows that his program is worth the tremendous effort it might take to read and understand it, as

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJuly 12, 2010 0

Using Gmail to send a message via SAS Enterprise Guide

You can use SAS Enterprise Guide to automate most aspects of queries, analytics, and reporting -- including sending e-mail notifications with the results. In this blog post, I'll show you how you can send these results and use Gmail as your e-mail provider. First, some background: SAS Enterprise Guide provides

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJune 28, 2010 0

Thinking economically

As I mentioned in a recent post, I've just completed reading Dear Undercover Economist by Tim Harford. I acquired a copy of Tim's book at the SAS Professionals Convention, and I was fortunate enough to meet Tim in person and have him sign the book. He impressed me as very

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Programming Tips

Kirsten HamstraJune 24, 2010 0

The Ultimate Set for SAS DATA Step Programmers

Are you a SAS DATA step programmer? If so, be sure to take advantage of this exclusive "buy 2 books, get 1 free" offer from SAS Publishing. Solutions for SAS Data Step Programmers: The Essential Three-Book Set of Examples from Michele Burlew features 3 of her most popular books, including:

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJune 11, 2010 0

Let's call the whole thing off

What do you do when you and your spouse are both SAS users, but one of you likes to point-and-click and the other really likes to write SAS programs? Is it possible to share a SAS environment, or are these irreconcilable differences that can lead only to a nasty custody

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerJune 9, 2010 0

Crayon guide to DATA step merges (and other links)

I'm using this post to share links to several SAS-related blogs created by others. This is me acting generous by sharing -- it's not me acting lazy by shirking an original post. Really. Datum Reparo! AnnMaria waves her SAS Enterprise Guide magic wand, utters a few (magic?) words, and makes

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMay 25, 2010 0

Reporting on SAS Information Maps

Like any good SAS professional, I subscribe to the SAS Samples RSS feed. The other day I found this sample that shows how to create a PDF report about the contents of a SAS Information Map. It's a nice example: it shows how to use the INFOMAPS engine and ODS

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Programming Tips

Mike KaltMay 25, 2010 0

SAS/GRAPH "SG" Procedures--Not Just for Statisticians!

If you are a SAS/GRAPH user, you may have heard about the new Statistical Graphics ("SG") procedures that are new in SAS 9.2. These procedures are designed to make it easier to produce common statistical charts and plots. You may have assumed that the procedures are only for folks who

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMay 24, 2010 0

Finding the FOREIGNers in your SAS environment

As Shane reveals on his blog, your SAS session is equipped to read data that are encoded for all types of machine architectures and locales. ASCII, EBCDIC, 32- or 64-bit, English, Japanese, Greek, Hebrew: the list goes on and on. SAS accomplishes this by using a feature called Cross-Environment Data

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerMay 18, 2010 0

Getting out of SORTs with SAS data

Why does this SAS program produce an error? proc means data=sashelp.cars mean median min max; by origin; run; It's because SASHELP.CARS is a SAS data set, and SAS data sets observations are stored and processed sequentially, and a BY group operation requires that the observations are already grouped and sorted

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