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Programming Tips

Strengthen your programming skills with tips and techniques from the experts

Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerNovember 20, 2007 0

Lengths and formats: the long and short of it

A reader from Bejing commented on a recent post with a question about data lengths and formats. While that wasn't really related to my post, I thought I'd attempt to answer in a new entry, here. The question is basically this: when I combine two data sets with a common-named

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 29, 2007 0

SAS 9 Tips O Plenty

SAS tip-meister Phil Mason shares a veritable cornucopia of tips at the CMG 2007 conference. Check it out, and learn how a healthy diet of flexible DATE formats can keep your Perl expressions regular.

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerOctober 5, 2007 0

You are under my command (prompt)

In his blog, Jared details the hoops one must jump through to convince SAS to run system shell commands (such as the X command and SYSTASK) from SAS Enterprise Guide. Here is the explanation: SAS Enterprise Guide is a client application, and SAS runs as a server application. When launched

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 28, 2007 0

How can you calculate someone's age?

"Cut him in half and count the number of rings?" Some folks on the discussion forum share a better method to calculate someone's age from SAS Enterprise Guide.

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 27, 2007 0

They all look the same to me: SAS.EXEs are everywhere

If you deploy the SAS 9 environment on Windows, you may have multiple SAS processes running on a single box (metadata process, OLAP server, multiple workspace servers). Windows Task Manager doesn't provide a great way to distinguish one sas.exe process from another, but Process Explorer does. Process Explorer lets you

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 19, 2007 0

fuente de la juventud (font of youth)

My new favorite typeface for programming is Consolas, a font designed for use with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. I use it there, but I now also use it for SAS programming. It uses ClearType technology, so the "crisp and clean" benefits kick in only when you have ClearType smoothing enabled.

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerSeptember 14, 2007 0

Will the real column "AGE" please stand up?

A colleague asked me to run a certain SAS program and then try to view the output in SAS Enterprise Guide. The output contained an SQL VIEW, and darn it, the application refused to open it, reporting only that the data "could not be opened." There was nothing wrong with

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 29, 2007 0

SAS alchemy: turn your SAS Report into PDF gold

Let's say you use SAS Report format, the latest tagset supported by ODS. After all, it's the lingua franca of SAS BI applications, since it's also used by SAS Web Report Studio, SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, and SAS Enterprise Guide. You've discovered how to use the report builder in

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Programming Tips

Chris HemedingerAugust 27, 2007 0

Updating library metadata, the fun and easy way

In the SAS BI-ogsource, Angela posts some sample SAS code for updating library definitions using the METALIB procedure. SAS Enterprise Guide users can make use of a friendlier interface to do the same job. Now available for download, the Update Library Metadata task plugs right into SAS Enterprise Guide and

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