PhilaSUG (Philadelphia Area SAS Users Group) is a non-profit professional organization whose primary purpose is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, increased knowledge of SAS® software, and professional advancement. Through the generous support of the SAS Institute [http://www.sas.com], PhilaSUG members enjoy once a year a speaker from SAS Institute, mailing of our newsletter and four books for door prizes. PhilaSUG also participates in the Speaker Exchange Program of the NorthEast SAS Users Group (NESUG [http://www.nesug.org]). These national and regional groups are able to bring us speakers from outside the Philadelphia area to speak on a variety of topics. In addition, speakers from our own area contribute their expertise, so PhilaSUG meetings always offer a stimulating mix of ideas. PhilaSUG holds three meetings annually (see the calendar of events ) and provides a published newsletter to its members. PhilaSUG Table of Contents [with date last updated]: Call for Papers [Aug 11, 2010] Calendar of Events [August 11, 2010] Mandatory Registration Link Coming Soon, please check back Parking details and the link to obtaining a parking pass will be sent to all people who register before the deadline [August 11, 2010] Membership [Jan 22, '10] PhilaSUG-L [Jun 8, '02] Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) [Jan 22, '10] Archive of Past Newsletters [Mar 24, 2010] Archive of Paper Presentations [June 16, 2010] Executive Committee Members [Apr 12, '10] Policy on recruiting at meetings [Oct 22. 09] Position Referral Binders Available at Meetings [Oct 22. 09] Employment Opportunities SAS-L discussion group SAS® Software WebRing If you have questions, comments, or concerns about PhilaSUG communicate with your PhilaSUG Executive committee by sending a message to webmaster @ PhilaSUG.org To automatically receive e-mail notification whenever this Web page changes         it's private    by ChangeDetection PhilaSUG-L is a very low volume Internet mail announcement list (Yahoo Group) devoted to interests of our PhilaSUG members. This is an opt-in service. That means if you would like to receive e-mail meeting announcements send an e-mail to PhilaSUG-L-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

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Links to selected SAS resources on the Web

The Power of PROC FORMAT Author: Jonas V. Bilenas, PhilaSUG Executive Committee Member Description: Are you a programmer, statistician, or data analyst tasked with generating reports? Discover how you can put the powerful FORMAT procedure to work for you with The Power of PROC FORMAT. Written in an easy-to-follow tutorial style and illustrated with real-world examples and solutions, this handy guide introduces beginning to intermediate SAS users to the functionality of the FORMAT procedure. Learn how the FORMAT procedure can recategorize data values while doing a variety of tasks, including building user-defined formats and informats, implementing a table lookup in SAS, using the DATA step and other SAS procedures, assigning descriptive labels to data values, creating new variables and finding unexpected values, generating data extracts, and merging data sets.

Resources to help you learn and use SAS by UCLA Academic Technology Services

Product Documentation

What's New in SAS SAS 9.2 [1.97 MB PDF download] SAS 9.1 SAS 8.2

Key Highlights of SAS^® 9.2

Visit the SAS 9.2 resource page for an overview of product enhancements as well as a list of related documentation and references. SAS 9.2 brings more analytical products and graphical capabilities to Base SAS as well as updates to other products such as SAS/STAT, SAS/GRAPH, SAS/CONNECT and others. Many enhancements are a direct response to requests from our existing customer base. Learn more

Learn how to add text between the output in an ODS HTML file.

The ODS TEXT= statement is used to insert text into an output file. When using this statement with SAS® 9.1.3, you must give the output destination (such as HTML, PDF, RTF, and so on), for example, ODS HTML TEXT='text-string'. When using this statement with SAS 9.2, however, you do not have to specify the output destination, for example, ODS TEXT='text-string'. Learn more

Ten Reasons Why a Statistician Should Update to SAS® 9.2

SAS 9.2 has been available for several months now. Many ask why they should upgrade to the newest release. This article lists ten great features that you will want if you are a statistician who uses SAS. A few of those reasons include updates to generalized linear mixed models, SAS/IML Studio, quantile regression and much more. Why should you upgrade?

SAS Communities

SAS Technology Report Tips Archive

Usage Note 39891: Using PROC PERMTEST to diagnose UNIX host authentication issues in SAS® 9.2

A message of the following type can mean that an authentication failure has occurred at the host level:
20081022:15.50.27.30: 00000000:ERROR: Access denied.
PROC PERMTEST provides a low-level tool to test authentication, and you can use it to determine if the authentication problem is in fact occurring at the host level. PROC PERMTEST performs two functions: It calls the sasauth module to test host-based authentication, then it tests user permissions.

Count Words, Specific Characters, Specific Substrings within a Text String    »

Beginning with SAS 9.1.3 there are new functions that can be used to count specific characters, specific substrings, and words in a string.
COUNT, COUNTC, and COUNTW were added to the BASE Functions in SAS 9.1.3. However, COUNTW is not documented in the 9.1.3 online documentation. It is in 9.2

COUNT will count the number of times a specific substring appears within a character string. Caution: If two occurrences of the specified substring overlap in the string, inconsistent results will be returned. For example, COUNT('boobooboo', 'booboo') might return a 1 or a 2.

COUNTC will count the number of times a specific character appears within a character string.

COUNTW will count the number of words that appear within a character string.

Sorting Text Without Regard to Case in SAS 9.2    »

PROC SORT is a frequently used Base SAS procedure with simple syntax. Unfortunately, anomalies in the key variables, especially mixed case character values, can present special challenges. Sort them out with this tip.


Eliminate duplicate observations from a large data set without sorting   »

PROC SORT with the NODUP or NODUPKEY option provides a way to eliminate duplicate observations from a data set. However, with a very large data set, PROC SORT may not be an efficient use of resources. This sample provides an alternative using PROC SUMMARY.

Bayesian Capabilities   »

Bayesian analysis techniques are now available in both SAS/STAT 9.1.3 and SAS/STAT 9.2.
PROC BGENMOD was introduced for SAS 9.1.3. (experimental procedure). Now, BGENMOD capabilities have been rolled into the GENMOD procedure for SAS 9.2 and are now production software. The BAYES statement produces Bayesian analysis via Gibbs sampling for most of the statistical analyses provided by the GENMOD procedure. This release also includes deletion diagnostics and plots for GLMs and GEEs, zero-inflated Poisson regression models, and AIC and QIC model fit statistics. Martingale residuals are now production. The LSMEANS statement now produces inverse link estimates.

SAS Discussion User Forums

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Wayne, PA (Near Philadelphia)
Philadelphia's SAS Public Course Schedule
Bedminster, NJ (20 miles northwest of New Brunswick)
Training Available at Bedminster
Check out the complete SAS Public Offerings at www.sas.com/training.