Tips, tricks and resources from SAS.

 

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May 2018
support.sas.com | email the editor

Dear Reader,

After sharing a bedroom for their entire lives, my daughters recently decided it was time for them to get separate rooms. While this meant saying goodbye to our bonus room, my wife and I were OK with the idea – they’re both in high school, and we understand the need for personal space. But we had two unexpected realizations while outfitting the new room: You can get a lot of Ikea furniture into the trunk of a Hyundai, and my wife is better at following instructions than I am. I discovered the latter as we started putting together the bed, dresser, desk and other pieces of furniture we got for the new room. While my wife had the patience to read (and follow) the step-by-step instructions, I would simply find two pieces that looked like they fit and screw them together. I’m here to tell you that her way is better.

As a SAS user, you may have noticed that we’ve started to add similar step-by-step instructions for a lot of our products through our new learning centers. Learning centers are located on a “Learn” tab of select SAS® product web pages and provide you with a clear, easy to follow learning path for moving from new user to expert. The pages highlight the most helpful video content, training, documentation, blogs and community content that SAS has to offer for a particular product.

Best of all, each learning center was developed by a team of product subject matter experts from across SAS, with representatives from R&D, Product Management, Technical Support, Education, Publications, SAS Consulting and other groups. I’ve been involved in a couple of these efforts, and we really dive deep into the product, determining the critical knowledge and primary tasks a user will face. The resulting step-by-step instructions make getting started with the product (in the case of a new user) or expanding your knowledge (for experienced users) easy.

Be sure to visit our 13 active learning centers and check back often – we’re in the process of building and launching many more. Learning centers currently exist for the following products:

SAS® Customer Intelligence 360
SAS® Data Loader for Hadoop
SAS® Decision Manager
SAS® Enterprise Guide®
SAS® Enterprise Miner™
SAS® Event Stream Processing
SAS® Model Manager
SAS® University Edition
SAS® Visual Analytics 7.4
SAS® Visual Analytics 8.2
SAS® Visual Forecasting
SAS® Visual Investigator
SAS® Visual Statistics

Of course, our learning centers represent just a fraction of the resources available to you. Visit our support pages to discover more product-focused resources like our how-to tutorials, SAS communities, documentation, training and technical support.

Thanks for reading,

Larry LaRusso
Editor, SAS Tech Report
Follow me @lalaru102

 

SAS® Tips and Tricks

 
SAS® certification review session: Base Programmer for SAS®9

SAS® certification review session: Base Programmer for SAS®9

Learn secrets for success in preparing for the SAS Base Programming for SAS®9 exam. In this on-demand webinar, SAS Global Certification and SAS Education experts share an overview of exam topics, present exam preparation tips and answer some of the most frequently asked exam-related questions by SAS users like you.

Advanced SAS® administration tasks in SAS® 9.4

Advanced SAS® administration tasks in SAS® 9.4

This webinar is ideal for advanced SAS users. The tutorial covers backup strategies and logging for your SAS environment. It’s one of a number of great resources you can find on the SAS Administrators page of support.sas.com.

Let SAS® write batch scripts for you

Let SAS® write batch scripts for you

Another reason programmers love SAS. In this blog post, SAS Consultant Leonid Batkhan shows you how to automate the creation of batch scripts and assign them proper executable permissions without ever leaving the comfort of the SAS environment. As Leonid says, “… automate the automation.” The post is a follow-up to his previous post, Running SAS Programs in Batch Under Unix/Linux.

How to expand the number of available SAS functions within the macro language

How to expand the number of available SAS functions within the macro language

The %SYSFUNC macro function allows you to access most SAS functions. This blog post demonstrates how %SYSFUNC can help in your programming needs when a macro function might not exist. It also shares the formatting feature that is built in to %SYSFUNC and introduce the %QSYSFUNC that masks the returned value.

SAS® tools for GDPR privacy compliant reporting

SAS® tools for GDPR privacy compliant reporting

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation taking effect on May 25 pertains not only to organizations located within the EU; it applies to all companies processing and holding the personal data of data subjects residing in the EU, regardless of the company’s location. Here are four selected SAS tools for GDPR that allow you to protect personal data in SAS reports by suppressing counts in small demographic group reports.

Fuzzy matching programming techniques using SAS® software

Fuzzy matching programming techniques using SAS®

When unique and reliable identifiers are available, it’s easy to match records using merge, join and/or hash programming techniques. But what happens when unique or reliable identifiers do not exist? This paper introduces fuzzy matching and popular data cleaning and user-defined validation techniques; the application of the CAT functions; the SOUNDEX algorithm; SPEDIS, COMPLEV and COMPGED functions; and an other programming techniques to resolve key identifier issues.

Make SAS® Enterprise Miner™ play nicely with SAS® Viya®

Make SAS® Enterprise Miner™ play nicely with SAS® Viya®

With a few simple tricks, SAS Enterprise Miner on SAS®9 will run seamlessly with your new SAS Viya installation. You can enjoy the perks of your old, familiar interface and your existing SAS Enterprise Miner projects, plus the advantage of faster, distributed, multithreaded processing on SAS Viya. This paper walks you through all the steps needed to make this work effortlessly, and the code to help you.

Working with big data in SAS®

Working with big data in SAS®

This paper demonstrates challenges and solutions when using SAS to process large data sets. You’ll get a brief overview of data flow using SAS/ACCESS® interface technology in traditional SAS and SAS Viya architectures, and data manipulation techniques using DATA step, SQL and DS2. We also discuss potential bottlenecks during processing and SAS programming tips to avoid them or minimize their effects.

 

From SAS® Communities

 
The future of SAS® Enterprise Guide® and SAS® Studio: A SAS® Global Forum recap

The future of SAS® Enterprise Guide® and SAS® Studio: A SAS® Global Forum recap

Several sessions at SAS Global Forum discussed the shared future of SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio. You can get a summary and learn more about both short- and long-term goals in this SAS Communities post. You can also see a test drive of the new SAS Enterprise Guide under development at the Future of SAS Enterprise Guide Tech Talk. And, of course, we welcome your feedback.

Tips for Splitting Data

Tips for Splitting Data

New contributor @Greeshma asks how to split the data into three random sets: 60 percent in a building set, 10 percent in a test set and 30 percent in a validation set. The SAS community offers a couple of solutions.

Create custom SAS® Mobile BI apps using SAS® SDKs

Create custom SAS® Mobile BI apps using SAS® SDKs

If you use SAS Visual Analytics, then you should already be using the SAS Mobile BI apps. The apps are free, and they’re available in the App Store, Google Play and the Microsoft Store. Create your own SAS Visual Analytics mobile apps that are personalized, pre-configured, customized and managed. Learn more.

SAS® News

 
Save the date: Analytics Experience 2018, Sept. 17-19, San Diego

Save the date: Analytics Experience 2018, Sept. 17-19, San Diego

At Analytics Experience 2018, you’ll learn the latest skills and emerging technologies that will help you discover new possibilities – whether you’re a data scientist, business user or executive. Registration opens May 22.

GDPR compliance in a data-driven world

GDPR compliance in a data-driven world

Beginning May 25, the General Data Protection Regulation comes into force and will affect all businesses processing EU data. Learn more about SAS’ recent global survey designed to understand the potential impact on organizations as they work toward GDPR compliance. In this webinar we’ll discuss the results of the survey, covering topics like the impact of GDPR on artificial intelligence, the biggest opportunities and challenges, a best practice approach to compliance, and how SAS is continuing to support the preparations of our customers.

 

SAS® Tech Report

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