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RATCLIFFE Technical Services Limited |
NOTE: |
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Issue 15. June 2004 |
Hints, tips, and experience for SAS(r) users | |
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Subscribe and/or view our archive of back issues at NoteColon.info |
We have another prize winner in this issue of NOTE: - Richard Philips was the first to send a correct solution for our second prize crossword. Well done Richard. The style guru's feature on the correct spelling of "data sets" in the last issue of NOTE: raised quite a swell in our mail bag. It appears to be a contentious issue. If we got some of our correspondents together in the same room it might end-up looking like a scene from Hell's Kitchen - better keep the chef's kitchen knives safely locked away! I hope you continue to find our hints and tips, plus our coverage of the SAS world, to be useful to you. Please feel free to pass your copy of NOTE: to your friends and colleagues; also encourage them to subscribe and receive their own copies. In addition, if you're changing jobs (or just changing email address) soon, don't forget to add your new address to our list. Visit our web page at www.NoteColon.info for simple instructions. -Andrew Ratcliffe |
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We were saddened to hear of the sudden death of Phil Bond, Chief Executive of SAS UK and SAS Ireland, just before Easter. Phil was one of the five people that started SAS's European operations in late 1980. Chief Executive since 1981, Phil ran all of the company activities in the UK and in Ireland. Under his lead, SAS UK and SAS Ireland have seen consistent, solid sales growth and currently account for the company's largest European revenue stream. Phil's presence in the SAS world will be sorely missed. |
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Demonstrate your knowledge of SAS |
Our second prize crossword, featured in issue 14 of NOTE:, was won by Richard Philips. Richard won a free, one-year licence for complementSoft's ASAP - the innovative tool for automatically producing data flow diagrams of your SAS code. Congratulations Richard! The answers to all of the clues are now available with the crossword, so if you pondered long and hard over any of the questions you can now put yourself our of your misery. Your continued interest in our crosswords means we are sure to do another soon. Keep an eye on our crossword pages. If you would like us to produce a themed crossword for your user group or training sessions, we'd be glad to hear from you. Just email us at enquiries@ratcliffe.co.uk. |
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The UK's independent SAS user group |
VIEWS' first ever two-day event at the end of May was judged a great success by those we spoke to at the conference. VIEWS is the UK's independent SAS user group, formed in 1996 by Bruce Bovill (SAS UK) and Phil Mason (Woodstreet Consulting). The three streams across the two days covered a wide variety of SAS-related topics, with a whole stream on each day dedicated to SAS version 9.1. Speakers came from an array of UK customer sites and consultancies, plus overseas locations including The Netherlands, USA, and Australia. The VIEWS web site offers further information, and the most recent issue of their most excellent newsletter contains a full report on the conference. We've listed some of our favourite nuggets from the conference in the following article. |
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Improving the product by improving the process |
Andrew Ratcliffe (RTSL Managing Director) presented a paper named "V is for Validation" at VIEWS 2004. Most SAS practitioners would agree that testing is a necessary part of the development process, but testing is actually one of the last steps in the whole validation process. Validation is not the same as testing. Andrew's paper introduced validation as a major part of the development process. It described key elements of the validation approach and focused on the "V-model". The emphasis was on a practical and cost-effective process for producing quality software solutions, as practised by Ratcliffe Technical Services. The paper discussed reaching an effective balance between quality, resources, and cost. The principles and processes discussed in Andrew's paper are equally applicable to waterfall, RAD, and agile projects; and to projects large and small. All were featured, together with a selection of appropriate tools for planning, automated testing, and documentation. You can see Andrew's slides in the Papers section of our website. |
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A few short tips from VIEWS speakers |
Here are a few little tips we noted whilst attending VIEWS papers. Simon Driscoll (Amadeus) mentioned that using alt-[ in the Enhanced Editor moves the cursor between pairs of DO and END statements. In other words, if you position the cursor on a DO statement and then press alt-[, the cursor will be moved to the END statement that is paired with the DO statement. Frank Poppe (PW Consulting) used PROC REPORT to generate tables with hyperlinked values. Frank associated the URLs of the links by using CALL DEFINE with the URL attribute, e.g. call define(myvar,'URL','listing01.htm'). Phil Mason (Wood Street Consulting) highlighted some ODS destinations that are released in version 9, but experimental and available for use in version 8.2. The destination named CHTML produces "compact" HTML, i.e. without lots of repetitive font tags and colour tags, etc. And HTMLCSS also produces compact HTML because it saves the repetition by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Finally, PHTML can produce compacted results too. |
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How Can We Help You? |
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Advertisement |
RTSL (Ratcliffe Technical Services Limited) is one of the leading SAS specialists in the UK. RTSL designs, builds, implements, and maintains SAS-based applications. With our imagination, expertise and analytical skills, we have the ability to help your company manipulate data to make informed business judgments. Providing services to the SAS community since 1993, RTSL has implemented a wide range of business solutions in a wide range of industries. See the case studies on our web site to get just a flavour of how we could help you. Contact us for further details. |
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Moving your data |
SAS provides many programmatic means of moving data to/from SAS data sets, and some of those means have an interactive front-end too. But did you know that there's a third-party product that can create SAS data sets from external data such as Excel tables? It can transfer data in the other direction too. The product is called Stat/Transfer, but its uses are not limited to statistical activities. Circle Systems' Stat/Transfer is a simple utility for transferring data between different software tools. From the SAS world, Stat/Transfer supports data sets for Windows and Unix, plus SAS transport files; from the non-SAS world, many formats are supported, including Excel, Access, JMP, ODBC, S-PLUS, and SPSS. Stat/Transfer is available for Windows and many UNIX platforms. Depending upon your circumstances and needs, you may find it more cost-effective than a SAS/ACCESS module. Until quite recently there was another similar product available - DBMS/COPY from Conceptual Software. However, in 2002, the DBMS/COPY family of products was sold to Dataflux Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of SAS. The product is still available, and details can be seen on the Dataflux website. The DBMS/COPY family of products has a wider scope of functionality than Stat/Transfer. |
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Size isn't everything |
When writing your SAS code, it is good practice to endeavour to produce code that uses system resources (CPU cycles, memory, disk space, etc) efficiently. But there is another factor that you should use to produce an overall balance: ease of maintenance. There are many cases where writing something to operate a little less efficiently will produce code that is much clearer to read and understand. And if that code needs to be modified at a later date (to fix a bug, or enhance it), the maintenance programmer will be able to do their job much more quickly if they could easily understand your code. Computer hardware is cheaper than humans(!), so remember ease of maintenance when you're trying to optimise your code. |
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Advertisement |
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This diary provides a guide to some of the key world-wide events that we judge to be of interest to SAS professionals. If you visit any of the listed events, please send us an email and let us know what you thought of it. |
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December 2004
April 2005
May 2005 March 2006 |
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You can subscribe and unsubscribe by visiting our web site at www.ratcliffe.co.uk. Or, to subscribe just click here and hit the Send button in your email client; and to unsubscribe, just click here and hit the Send button in your email client. Please do not include a message in the body of the email, it will not be seen by a human! Back issues are available from the archive at www.NoteColon.info. Please send comments to note.editor@ratcliffe.co.uk. NOTE:
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