I’m delighted that Phil Holland, Holland Numerics, has written a guest post today. Phil, clearly a SAS icon, is the author of numerous SAS books that are available from multiple sources. He recently expanded his work into some new and exciting formats, which he is discussing in this post. Writing SAS Books Let me be very clear about my attitude to writing books. I am never going to sell enough of my SAS books to compete with J K Rowling. I write books purely to market my SAS skills, and I’m never going to earn enough from selling books that will allow me to retire early, even if I wanted to! I discovered over the last few years that there are a lot of illegal copies of both my two previous books, and I mean a lot! Part of me is flattered by the proliferation of my books, and another part of me is offended by the criminal acts of illegally copying MY BOOKS! It appears that several people have obtained (bought?) paper copies of my books, scanned them and distributed the scanned copies on Torrent sites. I’ve informed SAS Publishing of these Torrent sites, but it is futile to […]
Tag: SAS Enterprise Guide
SAS BI Dashboard: Google Analytics Dashboard Kicked Up a Notch
Google Analytics uses data from your Website to prepare a neat looking application where you can explore your data and answer what I consider your first-level questions. First-level questions are the most basic things you might want to know, such as How many? What Time Period? It is the second- and third-level questions where the analysis and action plans come into play. After all, it’s not enough to know how many people visited the site – you need to know what segment attracted them and how do you keep them coming back for more. [More articles about Google Analytics here] Reviewing the Google Analytics Dashboard In the Google Analytics site from the Home tab, you can design a dashboard to review what you consider key measurements for your site. This dashboard is easy to use and works great for checking daily traffic. However, these measurements answer your basic questions, such as the counts. It’s more difficult to use the information for in-depth discovery. For instance, in the following figure I am comparing month over month traffic for the site using the Dashboard. This number indicates the total visits for each month. So, what can I learn from these metrics? Traffic […]
Reading your mind: Writing SAS code in the new Enterprise Guide editor
I taught my first SAS Enterprise Guide course more than 10 years ago using version 1.2. At that time, I would estimate 95% of my students did not know how to write SAS code and had no desire to learn the syntax! They just wanted to take advantage o…
SAS Enterprise Guide: Quick Tip for Selecting Text in Columns
Earlier in the week I discussed how I used Google Analytics to help me discover topics of the most interest. SAS Enterprise Guide was a popular topic, so here’s a quick tip that I like to use when working with text in columns. Moving Text around in SAS Enterprise Guide When it comes to data entry, I can assure you that I put the “Z” in lazzzzzzzzzzzzzy. Blech, I hate it more than pie charts. It’s the first thing I’ll have my home robot do when they finally become as normal as a refrigerator. So here’s a tip to save you some keystrokes. When you copy text in SAS EG, you generally have to copy entire rows, but sometimes you just need a list of variable names or the variable values. When you need to copy a column of data, do the following: Hold the ALT key while clicking and dragging to select the column. The column turns blue so you know it works. Press Ctrl+C to copy the column. Click where you want to place the text and press Ctrl+V to paste it. Then you can make any edits you desire. Applying this Trick Other Areas You can […]
Choose your own adventure with SAS OnDemand for Professionals
In the past, getting your hands on SAS for learning purposes required one of two fortunate situations: being a student enrolled in a college course (or high school!) where SAS is taught working for an employer who is willing to sponsor your training, either in an official course or on-the-job. […]
SAS BI: Looking at Google Analytics for Popular Blog Topics
This past week I have been studying the Google Analytics data to determine the best topics to discuss in the upcoming month and to prepare the SAS Glo Fo 2012 conference. Google Analytics allows me to measure which posts get the most hits when posted and continue to be popular or referenced. I’ll unveil my little known, but highly coveted analytics process. How’s that for some hype? Getting the Google Analytics Data In a past article, I discussed how I extracted the data from Google Analytics using Excellent Analytics. The following figure shows my query in the Excellent Analytics tool, the data results, and the results in SAS Enterprise Guide. The data consists of the date, post path and title (with URL), source (how person came to site), and visitor type. It’s probably obvious why I would want the date, post, and source but what is not so obvious is visitor type. Visitor Type allows me analyze what topics bring new visitors to the site as well as the topics that retain visitors. Cleaning Up the Data My original plan was to use MS Excel to complete this analysis since I thought it would be simple. However, I realized that […]
Uncovering the hidden parts of the SAS log
Before there was CNN or FOX News, people used to get their news from SAS. At least, that’s how I imagine that people kept themselves informed. What else can explain the existence of the NEWS= system option, which helps SAS admins to surface the must-know information to the SAS community? […]
SAS Global Forum: Is Google Analytics and SAS BI a good subject?
I’m really excited, Angela and I were invited to speak at the SAS Global Forum in Orlando in April. We were asked to talk about the SAS BI package and we have narrowed down our topic to SAS Information Map Studio, SAS Web Report Studio, and, if time allows, the SAS Information Delivery Portal. The point of the presentation is learning about the SAS BI clients – getting the data has proved to be a journey of it’s own. Step 1: Need some interesting data … The hardest part of preparing a teaching presentation is find data that presents some mystery and allows you to tell a story that resonates. Right now the leading topic is along the lines of “How do you let people know you have a book out there? How do you build excitement?” For us, building a companion website (this blog) that gave the users an idea of the book content was our answer. Plus the website would be a continuation of the book information for the users. The next question is – “How do you know it’s working?” Using the data that Google Analytics collects for this blog, I have been researching what kind of […]