SAS Tech Report: Become a better user or admin

SAS® Tech Report
November 2016
sas.com | email the editor

Dear Reader,

If you install, update, manage or maintain the SAS deployment at your company, you're a SAS administrator. It’s a critical role (often one of many!) you play for SAS users at your organization, and your impact is undeniable. Still, it's not always easy keeping your users happy and your SAS environment running smoothly.

In last month’s newsletter I mentioned changes we were making to the SAS support site in response to suggestions you’ve made and to help you find information more quickly and get help more easily. If you’re an administrator, you’ll be happy to hear one of those changes is a new SAS Administrators page, where you can get everything from hot fixes, downloads and security bulletins to tips and tricks to help you better manage your SAS environment. You’ll also find links to resources like blog posts for SAS administrators and the SAS Administration and Deployment Community. We trust these resources will make your job a little easier and make you a better SAS administrator.

In fact, I’d encourage all SAS users to spend a little time on the support site. It really is the best place for you to expand your SAS knowledge, discover available SAS resources by product, connect with other users and get the help you need.

Helping you become a better user is the mission of this newsletter as well. So read on for some great tips, tricks and resources – and thanks again for being a SAS user.

Larry LaRusso
Editor, SAS Tech Report
Follow me @lalaru102

SAS Tips and Tricks

What’s your favorite SAS® function?

SAS instructor Stacey Syphus has been teaching SAS programming courses for 15 years, but that doesn’t mean she knows every SAS function. With well over 500 functions and call routines in SAS, that’s understandable. In this post, Stacey and her fellow instructors offer their list of favorites. Are they missing any of yours?

Creating more complex reports

This paper from SAS Global Forum presents a nuts-and-bolts look at more complex report examples gleaned from SAS Communities and questions from students. Examples include use of DATA step manipulation to produce PROC REPORT and PROC SGPLOT output and examples of ODS LAYOUT and more. Read paper, view recording.

How to print the first n variables of a data set

Suppose you want to print the first few variables of a data set, but you don’t know the names of those variables. You can use PROC SQL to create a macro variable that contains a list of the first n variables. You can then use the macro variable in a PROC PRINT step. This sample code illustrates how.

New features in SAS® Enterprise Guide® 7.1

SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 was released in October 2014, with updates in 2015 and 2016. If you’d like to see all the wonderful new features that have been added in each of these updates, check out this series of four short videos. They demonstrate all the new additions – both for point-and-click users and SAS programmers.

SAS® Visual Analytics: Tips and tricks for users

This Ask the Expert session will provide you with options, tips and tricks, and best practices when using SAS Visual Analytics for data exploration and report design. You’ll learn how to design and publish BI reports and dashboards; explore data through interactive data visualization; and discover insights from any size and type of data.

Macro variables for info about your SAS environment

Have you ever needed to run code based on the client application that you are using? Or have you needed to know the version of SAS software that you’re running and the operating system that you’re running it on? This blog post describes a few automatic macro variables that can help with gathering this information.

How to perform real-time text analytics on Twitter streaming data in SAS® Event Stream Processing

SAS is perfect for collecting and analyzing unstructured events. Twitter might be the best example of a streaming data source. This post merges two needs: collecting unstructured data coming from Twitter and doing some text analytics processing on tweets (contextual extraction, content categorization and sentiment analysis).

Create patterns of missing data

When simulating data or testing algorithms, it’s useful to be able to generate patterns of missing data. This post from Rick Wicklin shows how to generate random and systematic patterns of missing values – in other words, how to replace nonmissing data with missing data.

From SAS Communities

Multiple ways to remove duplicates

Need to remove duplicates from your data set? This popular post from the General SAS Programming community provides several different ways to accomplish this task and sparks a lot of interesting conversation to help the SAS programmer.

Getting the most from your random forest

This tip from the SAS Communities Library shows you how to tune your random forest model in SAS® Enterprise Miner™ and shares a way in which you can efficiently and effectively study the effects of the tuning parameters using SAS code. It’s a methodology you can extend to the other modeling algorithms in SAS Enterprise Miner as well.

Converting yymmdd. to DATE9.

SAS user TurnTheBacon is having trouble changing the format of a numeric variable (not stored as SAS dates) with format yymmdd to the DATE9 format. Since it's not stored as a SAS date you can't simply apply a date format, but that doesn’t mean the data management community can’t solve this problem! See how.

SAS News

Need help preparing, blending and cleansing your big data?

Need help preparing, blending & cleansing your big data?

The latest SAS Data Management and SAS Data Loader for Hadoop update provides enterprise data preparation, expanded data access to cloud and SAS® Viya™ sources, and improved data governance and security when working with Apache Hadoop. Data professionals can now prepare data faster and make better decisions with data they can trust. Learn more at sas.com/data.

SAS^® Tech Report

www.sas.com | subscribe | unsubscribe

About this email:
Don't miss important updates from SAS! Please add sas.com as a domain in your safe sender list. Want to get more out of your relationship with SAS? Create a SAS profile.

SAS places great value in fair information practices and in connection with the management of our contact database, we would like to remind you that SAS Institute Inc. may use your personal contact details for marketing purposes, as stated in the SAS Privacy Statement. If you do not want SAS Institute Inc. to contact you by email for marketing purposes, please opt out here. To contact SAS via postal mail: SAS, SAS Campus Drive, Cary NC 27513 USA. ATTN: Legal Division/Privacy Manager.

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.