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SAS Global Forum creates a big buzz in the SAS user community, so in order to find out what the fuss is about, I decided to chat with a couple of our instructors who would be going to Las Vegas. In addition to teaching pre-conference training, these two instructors will present the two seminars, Fear SAS® Graphs No More! and Understanding Why Your Macros Don’t Work, on Monday, April 4th from 1:00-4:00 before the opening session.
Take a moment to read this Q&A feature with Marty Hultgren and Michelle Buchecker about the seminars they are presenting and what they look forward to on this trip to Vegas.
1. What do you each do for SAS?
Marty: I teach a number of SAS courses, including Programming 1, 2 and 3, Macro, SQL, SAS® Enterprise Guide® and Business Intelligence platform classes. I also write courses, review books by users and answer lots of interesting questions from students I’ve had in classes.
Michelle: Similar to Marty, I teach several classes, write courses and I am also the Curriculum Manager for many SAS Solutions. In addition to that, I manage the Midwest region which includes a staff of eight employees and five SAS training centers.
2. You’re each planning to present on papers written by Michelle. Tell us a little bit about what each of your sessions will touch on and what interests you about the topics.
Marty: Michelle had a business problem that she had been solving using Microsoft Excel, but which she converted to SAS Enterprise Guide. Using her paper (Fear SAS Graphs No More!) as a guide, I’ll show the process she used to get to the result – a process using both point-and-click tools in Enterprise Guide, and some customized code to massage the data and create some sleek and informative graphs. There are a number of interesting things about the talk, and about Michelle’s solution, including the way we move from a lesser to a more robust solution and the way a few small changes to the graph and title code, the addition of a bit of macro code and some simple prompts combine to make for a very useful solution.
Michelle: To add on to what Marty said, one of the main reasons I switched from Excel to Enterprise Guide is that I was tired of getting out the calculator to add numbers from an online Unix system to plug into my Excel spreadsheet … The paper I will be presenting (Understanding Why Your Macros Don’t Work) is good old Macro stuff. The Macro course is where we see the most number of repeat students, namely because of the nuances and intricacies of the Macro facility. There is a lot of power to the macro world, but with that power you need a lot of knowledge to make sure what you are doing is correct. My seminar will be a way to help understand why things work the way they do in the macro world.
Continue reading “2 Popular SAS Topics, 2 Awesome SAS Instructors, a Pinnacle SAS Event”
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