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 for the Fall 2012 meeting is now open! [April 21, 2012] Calendar of Events [April 21, 2012] [March 12, 2012] The Spring Meeting newsletter is now available. Important - In order to obtain an actuate food count every attendee must RSVP with a YES response by June 3rd at http://event.pingg.com/PhilaSUGSpring2012. An early response of MAYBE is helpful for early planning purposes only. Membership [Jan 22, '10] PhilaSUG-L [Jun 8, '02] Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) [Jan 22, '10] Archive of Past Newsletters [Oct 1, 2011] Archive of Paper Presentations [Oct 1, 2011] Executive Committee Members Oct 22, 2011] Policy on recruiting at meetings [Oct 22. 09] Position Referral Binders Available at Meetings [Jan 16, 2011] Employment Opportunities SAS-L discussion group Philadelphia Area Tourist Information: Delaware Valley CDISC Users' Network [Oct 16, 2011] 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.

Also of Interest:

Links to selected SAS resources on the Web

SAS® Tech Report July 2011 The SAS® 9.3 release is here, and it falls near an auspicious date - SAS' 35th anniversary in July 2011. SAS 9.3 includes enhancements in data management, improvements in SAS' environment management and expansion of analytic capabilities that will allow you to do even more. There are many large and small changes, so I'll only be able to name a few here: Not necessary to upgrade from SAS 9.1.3 to SAS 9.2 before upgrading to SAS 9.3 - a huge time savings, I'm sure you'll agree! Producing graphs with ODS Graphics no longer requires a SAS/GRAPH® license. The family of statistical graphics procedures (SGPANEL, SGPLOT, SGRENDER and SGSCATTER) has moved from SAS/GRAPH to Base SAS. In SAS 9.3, the default destination in the SAS windowing environment is HTML, and ODS Graphics is enabled by default as well. (You can disable ODS Graphics if desired. Read more below in Tips & Techniques.) SAS Rapid Predictive Modeler, a component of SAS® Enterprise MinerTM, has been enhanced with options for integrated scoring and data set output. The new FMM procedure in SAS/STAT® fits finite mixture models. Within SAS Data Integration Studio, you can now save versions of jobs, tables and other metadata to a SAS Package file, and then archive the package in a third-party versioning system. SAS Model Manager 3.1 now has the ability to retrain models. You'll now have the ability to provide single sign-on on Unix SAS servers. A new JMP engine enables you to quickly and easily read your JMP data tables into SAS. This is a small sampling of what you will get when you make the move to SAS 9.3. Read about all of the changes in this downloadable PDF. There are also some great SAS 9.3 resources on support.sas.com. While you are checking out the new stuff, notice that there's even a new GROOVY PROC – maybe we'll include PEACHY and KEEN procedures next!! I was sent this YouTube video to celebrate the GROOVY PROC. Enjoy. Waynette Tubbs Editor, SAS Tech Report

sasCommunity Tip of the Day for July 18

In SAS®9.2, a new reserved macro variable named _METAFOLDER is available. The value of the variable is the SAS metadata path for the currently running stored process. This allows a program to reference another stored process in the same folder without having to hard-code the entire path, or parse the path value from the _PROGRAM macro variable. In version 9.1.3, you can use the storedProcessPath macro (see the read more link below) get the path value of the currently executing stored process, and more. ....read more Submitted by Don Henderson.

About Don Henderson

Don Henderson is the Owner and Principal of Henderson Consulting Services, a SAS Affiliate Partner. Don has used SAS software since 1975, designing and developing business applications with a focus on data warehouse, business intelligence, and analytic applications. Don was one of the primary architects in the initial development and release of SAS/IntrNet software in 1996, and he was one of the original developers for the SAS/IntrNet Application Dispatcher. Don has presented numerous papers at SUGI and regional SAS user group meetings, and continues to be a great supporter of SAS and its products.

Rick Langston talks about SAS 9.3

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

Product Documentation

What's New in SAS SAS 9.3 SAS 9.2 [1.97 MB PDF download] 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.

To read more about SAS 9.2, use the following links:

• New Software Offerings Introduced in SAS 9.2
• Foundation SAS Enhancements in SAS 9.2
• Reporting, Data Integration, and Analytics Enhancements in SAS 9.2
• Installing, Configuring, and Migrating to SAS 9.2
• Maintenance and Upgrades
• The third maintenance for SAS 9.2 is now available. Read more about SAS 9.2 (TS2M3).
• SAS 9.2 overview content has been updated with the latest release information.
• The most current release of SAS software is SAS 9.2. For information about product and system release numbers, read SAS 9.2 Provides New Product-Specific Release Numbers.
• SAS Product pages is a resource that offers a one-stop shop for documentation, samples, training and news about a specific product. This information span the two most recent releases of SAS software. To access the product-specific information, locate your product in the A-Z listing and explore what support.sas.com has to offer.
• The Hot Fix site has been updated for SAS 9.2 TS2MO and later. To find out more about the changes, read Important Changes to Hot Fixes.

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

Now that the full release of SAS 9.2 is available, many sites are making decisions about when to install this new release. Here are the top ten reasons why we think that statisticians should update to SAS 9.2 right awa 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.

SAS Discussion User Forums

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SAS Institute Training Opportunities in the Local Area:

Wayne, PA (Near Philadelphia)
Philadelphia's SAS Public Course Schedule
Bedminster, NJ (20 miles northwest of New Brunswick)
Courses Available in Bedminster, NJ
Check out the SAS Complete Course List (