Archive of Past
Presentations
05Mar1999 Meeting
Additions to the SAS System including ODS
Paul Kent, SAS Institute, Inc., Cary, NC
The BASE procedures group (a.k.a. Information Products) at
SAS Institute has been hard at work adding new and useful
features to the heart of the SAS System. Covered are:
- General additions to SAS Software that should make the
programmers life an easier one.
- New SUMMARY/TABULATE options like percentiles,
independent ordering of class variables, and the pre loading
of the class-variable space using formats and/or a data sets
of desired class level values.
- The ODS statement for producing output data sets and
HTML output from all SAS procedures, High Fidelity Printing
and more. ODS is an acronym for Output Delivery System.
- ODS specific additions to PROC REPORT, PROC TABULATE and
the SAS/Graph Procedures.
Paul has been a SAS User for almost 20 years and has
worked for SAS Institute far longer than he thought he'd hold
any single job. Paul's previous contributions to SAS Software
include PROC SQL; the WHERE Clause and TCP/IP connectivity.
Currently Paul manages the developers responsible for ODS and
the majority of BASE SAS Procedures.
What Your Mother Never Told You About the Query Window
Janet E. Stuelpner, ASG, Inc., Cary, NC
The query window is a point and click way to extract data
from a table. With very little instructions, you can create an
SQL program to gather data, manipulate it and create reports.
Does it have limitations? The answer to that is yes. Is there
a work around for those limitations? The answer is also yes.
This presentation will explore what some of the limitations
are in the query window and how to program around them.
Janet Stuelpner provides programming support for clients
in may industries that include: pharmaceutical, banking,
brokerage. She also provides both individual and group
technical training when needed at the client sites. Janet has
several degrees in the sciences and has been a SAS user for 18
years. She has experience in the MVS, UNIX, OS/2 and Windows
environments. Originally a systems programmer, she has now
turned her focus to applications programming. In the last
several years, she has given many presentations at local,
regional and national conferences and has been a frequent
presenter to our group.
11Jun1999 Meeting
The New FDA Industry Guidelines for Electronic
Regulatory Submissions
Rich Vachal, President Industry Dynamics Associates
In January 1999, the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and
Research (CDER) published its new Industry Guidelines for
providing Regulatory Submissions in Electronic Format. This
presentation will provide an overview of the key concepts
contained in these Guidelines and discuss specific compliance
issues with respect to bundling SAS datasets, programs and
documentation along with the electronic dossier. It will
conclude with a short demonstation of a guidelines-compliant
integrated review environment utilizing SAS, Microsoft
Explorer and Acrobat Reader.
Rich Vachal is President of Industry Dynamics
Associates, Inc. located in Somerset, NJ. Since 1984 IDA has
operated as a pharmaceutical industry technical support firm
specializing in SAS analytical programming and e-submission
software verification and packaging services. He has an
undergraduate degree in International Relations from the
College of William and Mary and a graduate training in
econometrics and statistics from Rutgers.
PROC LP for Dummies -or- How to decide which NFL games
to attend
Bob Bertolatus, Consultant
In the March NJSUG newsletter, I proposed a problem for
solution in my "Mind Iron" article below. After receiving no
answers I decided to "tackle" it myself. The selection of
fifteen football games to attend in seventeen weeks of
football season is a task we can understand.
- On "1st down", the topic of Operations Research will be
introduced.
- Secondly, the data step programming required to present
the problem to PROC LP will be attempted.
- On third, we will plunge into the problem with varying
preferences for the 1998 season.
- Finally, we'll go for broke and modify our work to solve
for 1999 schedule (with 31 teams).
Bob, who serves on the executive board of NJSUG, has
been a computer consultant since 1985, working mostly in the
SAS environment. He also teaches Computer Fundamentals and SAS
at Raritan Valley Community College in North Branch. Bob
received his B.S. and M.S. from Rutgers University in
Industrial Engineering/Operations Research.
Mind Iron
Bob Bertolatus (title refers to pumping iron for the mind,
i.e. mental exercise)
I've come up with an intriguing task that I'd like to
present as a challenge to the New Jersey SAS Users Group.
Suppose one wanted to truly experience the NFL and see each of
the thirty teams in action, in person. Can it be done ? It
seems possible because to see thirty teams, you need to attend
fifteen games. The NFL season extends for seventeen weeks. So
this task should have a solution ( if not many).
Reflecting back to the simpler times of my past when I
studied Operations Research, I recognize this as the type of
problem that OR solved. But back in the 70s, we only
formulated the problem, maybe tried a 3x3 by hand and that was
the end of it. Your mission ( if you decide to accept ) is to
pick only one game each week to attend to see all thirty teams
once and only once. Once the problem is formulated, various
constraints can be added to truly flex your noggin:
- Avoid/prefer Monday or Sunday night games ( & Thurs &
Sat ), 1:00 pm vs 4:00 pm games
- Avoid/prefer artificial turf - domed stadiums
- Moderate/extreme temperatures ( North in September,
South in December or vice versa )
- Minimize travel ( like analyst John Madden traveling by
bus )
- Try to see the weaker teams at home to enjoy closer
games ( maybe cheaper tickets )
- Try to see evenly/poorly matched games
- Start in week three, then go to for 15 straight weeks
- Prefer smaller or larger cities
The data can be grabbed from the WWW. Use the 1998 season.
Here is a 1998 schedule file with the schedule and additional
information about the teams ( New! 31Mar99 ). If you so
desire, your efforts can be published here to strut your
mental physique in front of your peers ( email me). Have fun!
15Sep1999 Meeting
Longitudinal Data Techniques: Looking Across
Observations
Ronald P. Cody, Ed.D, Dept. of Environmental and Community
Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
One of the most difficult tasks for a SASŪ programmer is to
perform operations across multiple observations. For example,
you may have a data set of patient visits, with a variable
number of visits per patient and the data for each visits
stored in a separate observation. Some of the techniques for
working with such data include the RETAIN statement, FIRST.
and LAST. logical variables, the LAG function, and the use of
multiple SET statements (each with a separate FIRSTOBS=
option). Other techniques for summarizing data for each
patient (such as the number of visits, the mean and median of
some variables) involve procedures such as PROC FREQ, PROC
MEANS and PROC UNIVARIATE to output summary data sets. This
talk will demonstrate and discuss these techniques.
Dr. Ron Cody is an Associate Professor in the department
of Environmental and Community Medicine at the Robert Wood
Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, New Jersey. He has been a
SAS user for more than 20 years and is the author of Applied
Statistics and the SASŪ Programming Language (fourth edition),
published by Prentice Hall. Along with Ray Pass, he has
written a book called SASŪ Programming by Example, a book of
annotated SAS examples, published by the SAS Institute as part
of their Books by Users series. His latest books, also
published by the SAS Institute, are The SAS Workbook, and the
SAS Workbook: Solutions. He is currently under contract with
the SAS Institute for a book on Data Cleaning Techniques. Ron
has presented invited papers for numerous local, regional, and
national SAS conferences.
Discontented with PROC CONTENTS? Expand
it with FMTLIB
Irene Mendelson
In the pharmaceutical industry, the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) has issued guidelines on the
documentation it wants to accompany data and programs to
support the electronic form of a New Drug Application (NDA) on
CD-ROM. In short, the FDA thinks that PROC CONTENTS is not
enough to tell the whole story on a data set and wants to see
all of the values and codes for any formats used.
The key is to tap into information about the data set and
its variables that is displayed in PROC CONTENTS and into
information about variable formats and values displayed
through special options on PROC FORMAT. These two information
sources can be joined together using PROC SQL, output into a
spreadsheet, and then copied and pasted into Word, where some
final editing may be required. Although this does require a
few steps, the benefits of this degree of automation are clear
when facing manually combining PROC CONTENTS and PROC FORMAT
output for many data sets with many variables, as is typically
the case with a drug submission.
Although this technique was developed specifically for the
submission of the electronic form of a New Drug Application (NDA)
on CD-ROM, it has wider application for others who are
discontented with what PROC CONTENTS has to offer.
Irene Mendelson was first introduced to SAS in 1987 and
has used it off and on since then in her work in the
pharmaceutical industry. She is currently an independent
consultant doing clinical trials programming support at a
major pharmaceutical company. Her areas of interest include
SAS/GRAPH, SAS Macro, and SAS/FSP. She was an invited speaker
for three straight SUGIs, giving various papers and a hands-on
workshop. She has also given papers at NESUG, NYASUG, and
NJSUG. She currently serves on the Executive Committee for the
NorthEast SAS Users Group and is fulfilling the User Group
liaison role, and was the Conference Co-Chair for NESUG'98 in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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