I’ve known several people who were raised during the Great Depression, and I’ve observed that they are very mindful of waste. My wife’s grandmother used to save plastic bags, twist ties, and relatively clean alumninum foil for potential reuse in …
Tag: SAS tips
Graphics for univariate data – Pie is delicious but not nutritious
When you have univariate data, that is, a single measure on a variety of units, the most common statistical graphic is a pie chart. But pie charts should not be used. Ever. When there are a lot of units, pie charts are unreadable. When there are on…
Scatterplots and enhancements
When you have two numeric variables and are interested in the relationship between them, the basic statistical graph is the scatterplot. These can be good, but there are ways to enhance them and there are also alternatives which can be better in so…
You asked for it: the Autoexec process flow
AUTOEXEC.SAS wasn’t enough for you. Yes, it’s a sure-fire way to run SAS statements (such as LIBNAME assignments or macro definitions) whenever you start your SAS session, but you found it has limitations when used in configurations with lots of …
The SAS code formatter: more than a pretty face
A customer phoned up SAS Technical Support the other day with a problem. (Yes, that happens occasionally…) When he ran a certain program through SAS Enterprise Guide, the program didn’t seem to complete and no results were returned. Here is a …
SAS logs in Enterprise Guide: Where’s the beef?
You might be too young to remember Clara Peller. She was the star of a series of fast-food burger commercials in the 1980s, in which she demanded meatier meals by shouting “Where’s the beef?” at the pickup counter or drive-through window. Alas, …
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…
Five strategies to eliminate passwords from your SAS programs
Many people mistakenly assume that just because you want to use a SAS program to access a protected resource (such as a database table), you must include the credentials for the resource inside your program.
Few things cause a database administra…