Blogging about all things SAS

Every now and again I get to right some SAS code.

And every know and again I need to transform SAS dates, from Date/Time to Date9 or from Date to Date/Time etc.

Its one thing that I always end up looking at SAS support for the correct syntax.  So Im going to post each one I use here so I can find them easily.

SAS Date to Date/Time

To convert a SAS date to a SAS Date/Time, by adding a time of 00:00:00 to it use:

dhms(<date_variable_name>,0,0,0)

If you install the SAS 9.2 Addin for Microsoft 4.2 it disables your undo capability in Excel.

This happens in both office 2003 and 2007.

Seems it is a known issue since June 2009.

There is a work around to fix it here:

Problem Note 36601: Cannot undo changes in Microsoft Excel when the SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office is installed

There is also a related note here:

Usage Note 37701: Additional SAS® Add-In for Microsoft Office configuration is required to restore functionality of the Undo button in Microsoft Excel

Which states it  “can be fixed by applying the second maintenance release for SAS 9.2 (TS2M2).”

Was talking to somebody the other day about the future of BI.  For me the next phase for one of our projects is:

• Google search integration
• Mashups
• More self service
• Better targetted dashboarding
• Strategy map visualisation
• Process flow visualisation
• Alerts

But it was quite rightly pointed out these are all capabilities that have been around for a while and none of them were innovations.

Then we got onto a discussion about Portals and personalisation.  And we came to the realisation  that BI Portal capabilities have fallen way behind the current round of website capabilities.

• Where are the Google style single page, let me tell you what I want and you show me?

• Where are the full personalisation like Yahoo where I can drag and drop things on my page, display whatever I want where I want, without the need for somebody else to build it?

• Where are the Google/Yahoo style desktop widgets/gadgets/(insert word here)gets

• Where is the syndication, let me tell you what I like and then tell me when you have it

• Where are the collaboration capabilities like Blogs/Twitter, let me show everybody when I have created or found something usefull

• Where are the social network capabilities, aka facebook, where content is only part of the community

If our target audience for BI is the the masses, then these are the capabilities they are used to using on a daily basis.  Who knows what will be next, buy isn’t BI capabilities already behind?

So ok starting with a topic of portal personalisation, I quickly got off topic into a whole raft of capabilities, or did I?  Isn’t that what portals are all about, personalising content to meet a users needs and expectation.

So here in sunny New Zealand a lot of customers are migrating to SAS 9.2 this year, but some won’t make it till next year (or beyond).

One customer I work with is in the next year camp.  We have just started the rollout of EG across the business and one of the things we encourage/mandate is that before a user gets access to EG they must have attended the SAS EG course. (EG is just so damn powerful/dangerous in a untrained users hands!)

But just been told SAS now only run courses using SAS 9.2 software.  So a dilemma or is it?

If we send our users on the EG 4.2 course I am concerned they will see all the things EG 4.1 doesn’t do and will focus on that, not the things EG 4.1 does very well (compared to other tools, SAS and non SAS)

But then again we need them trained.

EG 4.2 is a little different to EG 4.1 in navigation, functionality etc, but probably not enough that the user will get lost using 4.1 after being trained in 4.2.

(and I can understand SAS need to move training/courses to the latest version etc)

We have the SAS eLearning available to users (funnily enough still only SAS 9.1 based, wonder when that will change to 9.2?), so maybe self learning is enough?

Interested in your views, what are you doing for SAS 9.1 training?

Of course the customer is also currently recruiting BAU DI resource, so DI studio training will be a much bigger issue as DO Studio 3.4 compared to DI Studio 4.2 is a much bigger change.

Lastly if you know of any companies that sell SAS 9.1 training material (these have to have been developed independently of the SAS Education course notes of course and we will check!) that we could use to deliver internal training, let me know.

I love these motion charts that Google delivers:

http://www.google.com/publicdata/home

Unfortunately Government clients in NZ can;t use them as it is against the rules to store this data externally.

I know SAS JMP has this capability and you can export the motion charts as a flash file and embed it in the portal, but a portlet that allows these to be displayed dynamically in the Portal will be soooo cool.

Unfortunately even the new graph engine we are moving to doesnt provide these.

So need to move this from an idea to a delivery….

When installing SAS 9.1.x from a software depot, you needed to have an Install Plan and the only people who could generate these were SAS employees.

For SAS 9.2 there are now sample install plans available on the SAS  site here:

http://www.sas.com/installcenter/plans

Of course I was looking for a STM install plan, which isn’t there but that is different issue ….

SPM 1.4 was based around an XML as the backend and for the frontend HTML and from memory SVG.  In SPM 2.x you can publish diagrams in SVG as well.

The cool thing with SVG is that the images are all created based on txt files with location and colour information.

Check this one out:

http://www.degrafa.org/source/Car/Car.html

Then right click and look at the source, nothing but txt cool!

Pity SVG is not more widely adopted, but then with the advent of flash and flex and there navigation abilities, I suppose it is not surprising.

We have been looking at the options to add additional graph types to our Flash Graph Portlet.

We would prefer to OEM something as it will give us a better long term strategy.

In researching options I found this Interesting blog post 28 Rich Data Visualization Tools.

Some we had already found some we hadn’t.

Still no Google Motion Chart options (aka SAS JMP chart), which I really want to include as a graphing option.

Technologyevaluation.com sent me an email inviting me to use an online BI evaluation capability to see which BI vendor best meet my needs.

All the standard vendors (i.e SAP/BO, Oracle, Microsoft) are there but SAS is prominent in the fact that it is missing.  Even more so when there are a number of small BI Vendors in the list (Yellowfon, Oco) I have never heard of.

http://demo.technologyevaluation.com/register/freetrial/start.asp?tecreferer=TEC_BIE&siteID=130&contentOnly=false

(You will need to register)

Also interesting to note there are a number of Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings included.

Every now and again when I get some spare time I troll through the SAS forum papers to see what gems I can find.

Robert Meekings posted a comment on my blog post about the Thotwave Administration paper I liked, highlighting it was very similar to a paper they did at SF 2008.

So that got me thinking how many other great papers are there hiding in the SAS Forum archive, that I (and others) have never seen?

So a question to anybody who cares to respond, post a comment linking to your favorite SAS Forum paper and a short description why it is your favorite. Lets see what gems are hiding out there.

(And a note to all the comment spammers out there, neither I or other SAS users are interested in little blue pills or other such things, and comments are not automatically posted, so don’t bother – can’t believe how many Spam comments people waste their time entering.)

(in fact here is a suggestion to the blog spammers out there (well a polite one anyway I cant post my other suggestions) go out and buy the how to use SAS Enterprise Guide book, read it, learn the tool and then work with customers who need help getting insight from their data, you will earn more and have a much more enjoyable life!)