SAS® History (years using SAS, platforms, primary products, etc.): I’ve been using SAS products since being tossed a SAS manual during a co-op work term long, long ago. I was asked to provide SAS support for a company that had just installed it, while the only person in the organization with SAS experience went on a three-week vacation. Fortunately, I didn’t discover the enormity of what there was to learn until the end of the three weeks. I have recently celebrated 20 years in consulting, providing SAS development and support services to clients in a variety of industries and am delighted to still be learning new things about SAS.

Pets: Two lazy, middle-aged cats who completely rule the household.

Partner/Family: See pets, above.

Sports/Hobbies: These days, leisure time is all about preparing for the role of conference co-chair of NESUG 2010, which will be held in Baltimore, MD. That should be another great opportunity for SAS users to get together and share ideas.

What your ideal weekend would be: Spent outdoors in moderate weather, on or near water.

Favorite Foods: Chocolate!

If I could be anything at all (besides a SAS programmer), I would be: The innkeeper at a small oceanfront inn, enjoying leisurely morning coffee while chatting with interesting, well-traveled guests. Of course, there’d be lots of enthusiastic and energetic staff to deal with all the hard work of running a place like that.

When I’m not using SAS: I like to spend my time outdoors, on or near a large body of water – usually Lake Ontario.

One thing every SAS programmer should know (a techie tip - this could be at any level - e.g., a simple programming tip, something new you’ve learned lately, macros, whatever you think may be helpful for other SAS users):

I rarely get through a day of programming without using formats. I think everyone who analyzes data in SAS should be using formats – whether they’re standard ones for things like grouping dates or user-defined formats for categorizing data values, subsetting data based on values and highlighting unexpected values or combinations while analyzing data.

For example, using the standard SAS format, YEAR, the following code will show the count of records per calendar year. There’s no need to extract the year part of a value stored as a SAS date into a separate variable in order to categorize.

proc freq data = MY_TEST_DATASET;
tables my_date_value / list missing;
format my_date_value year4.;
run;