Tag: formats

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 […]

Info Map: Why does the data item show as scientific notation?

When a data item is created in Information Map Studio, the defaults are assigned for classifications and aggregations.  If the data item is a percentage, this defaults may not make sense.  For instance, the following figure shows the Gross Margin in scientific notation instead of a percentage. When the data item was imported, the default aggregation method was SUM, which does not work in this case.  The gross margin is your profit from this sale and it should remain constant or in other words. So how do you fix it? You need to change the default measurement for the data item. For a value like Gross Margin, there is not reason to aggregate this data item – when is a sum of all Gross Margins for a customer or product used? For this item, the gross margin is associated with the Product data item.  Any product no matter to which customer in any region, the gross margin remains constant.  You have to select a default aggregation method, so I chose Average.  I thought it would make the most sense to the end user.  I could have also used Minimum.  In the following figure, minimum would have set the value to […]

NOTE: Whither the WEEK Format?

My friend Eli recently wrote to tell me of a very successful 9.1 to 9.2 upgrade that was marred by just one issue. His colleague Sarah discovered that the WEEK format disappeared between 9.1 and 9.2. Sarah had been using the WEEK format to produce week…

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 p…