SAS Macros in Cartoons: Complex Stuff Made Easy!
While this seminar is presented to help newer programmers, people with a decade of experience say they learn things as well, as this seminar also covers some advanced topics.
Working SAS professionals spend 90% of their time in the DATA step and the macro language. Macros are used in almost every SAS corporate/consulting environment to make SAS code simpler and easier to maintain. Additionally, macros are used to automate processes and make processes/programs "production". Without knowledge of SAS macros, a new employee cannot maintain, or sometimes even read, legacy SAS code (legacy code is code written by the last person who last had your job or by the person who sits in the next cube). Not being able to read code is a very unpleasant situation, with severe career implications.
Topics covered include:
Important "Take Aways" from the seminar are:
Working SAS professionals spend 90% of their time in the DATA step and the macro language. Macros are used in almost every SAS corporate/consulting environment to make SAS code simpler and easier to maintain. Additionally, macros are used to automate processes and make processes/programs "production". Without knowledge of SAS macros, a new employee cannot maintain, or sometimes even read, legacy SAS code (legacy code is code written by the last person who last had your job or by the person who sits in the next cube). Not being able to read code is a very unpleasant situation, with severe career implications.
Topics covered include:
- The SAS Supervisor
- Tokenization
- Macro catalogs
- Macro Symbol Table and macro variable scope
- %LET and &
- Single vs. double quotes
- %DO loop and the &&state&i
- Automating with SQL and the %SCAN loop
- Conditionally executing code with a %IF
- Evaluating multiple ampersands
- CALL SYMPUT and CALL SYMGET
- CALL EXECUTE
- Wrapping code in a macro and calling it with different parameters
- Making macro code snippets (macros that generate part of a SAS statement)
- Using macros to automate a process (two common ways to make a program)
- Using macros to create data-driven programs
Important "Take Aways" from the seminar are:
- 1000+ lines of SAS macro examples (all the examples in the class)
- Sample Code for how to perform the 4 common macro tasks
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About the Instructor
Russ Lavery is a frequent and multiple award-winning presenter at SAS and Stat conferences all over the US, in Europe and Asia. He has been a technical reviewer on five books on SAS and statistical topics, including two books on Machine Learning. He has over 25 years of experience using SAS and is still studying. Russ is a contractor and lives outside Philadelphia, PA, where he occasionally teaches as an adjunct in the Drexel University analytic program and dances frequently.
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