Local SAS User Groups, mostly in Tweets
Go to your local users group. If you don’t know if you have a local users group in your area, check the sascommunity.org page that lists bunches of them. There are six in California listed on their site and I heard of two others that started very recently that aren’t listed.
LABSUG is the Los Angles Basin SAS Users Group and it is pretty typical. It only meets once a year, organized by the FABULOUS Kim Le Bouton. If you live around LA, you should go. It is super-cheap at $35 for early registration, you get to meet about 100 people who are interested in SAS and statistics and the speakers are good.
If you are a hyper-critical type of person, well you can find something to criticize, but don’t sit next to me. Since there is only one session at a time, you may find some sessions too advanced for you and others too basic. I have two suggestions in this case:
- Try to benefit in some way. Even if it is way too advanced, you can probably glean something. Then, when a year or so down the road you run into that concept or procedure again, it won’t be completely unfamiliar. If it is too basic, if you have forgotten more SAS/ statistics than most people will ever know, there may be something in there you have forgotten. If you are that advanced, you probably present or teach a lot yourself. Personally, I’m always on the look out for good tips, from references to visuals to organization, that help get a point across and keep the audience from falling asleep.
- Do something else during that talk. Come late or leave early – the agenda is published in advance. If you need to step out and check your text messages, send an email to the office or catch up on work, no one is going to get upset. It’s not middle school. You don’t have to go to every class. We’re all adults and understand everyone has multiple responsibilities.
On the flip side, although not every talk will meet everyone’s interest or need, almost everyone will find at least ONE topic that is useful. It’s something for everybody and the great advantage of local users groups is their accessibility to everyone. You don’t need thousands of dollars in your travel budget.
What you missed, in tweets
(Not only is this an extremely lazy way to do a blog post, but it also accomplishes the main purpose of this blog which is to remind me of stuff I thought and then forgot. For example, the COMPARE statement and looking up what a segment is.)
In reverse chronological order…
Ods HTML gpath=”something” – will save your graphs in the specified directory. nice
I’m thinking of making a bubble chart that looks lie soap bubbles because #maturityIsOverrated
Ods journal style good for graphs that are going to be printed in black and white
With Compare statement with sgscatter you can, for example, have side by side plots of your experimental and control groups
I created each of these plots with just 3 statements – & 1 of the statements was “run” – Lora Delwiche
Lora Delwiche just made everyone in the room a believer in SGPLOT
Renato at LABSug worth knowing the difference between if-then & SELECT statement
Take-away from GTL presentation – you can make any kind of graph you can imagine- whether you should or not is a different issue
If I was doing a talk on graphics I would interleave program statement slides with slides of what this does on the graph
Proc gproject projects data into a Cartesian coordinate space – who knew?
I don’t know what segment does in the maps data set. Must find out
I think if I needed a graph as fancy as some of those in the GTL examples I’d have an artist draw it vs use SAS
I understand the R comment – GTL looks more like “real programming” that typical SAS code. not sure that is good
Interesting population pyramid example at LABsug comparing population distribution of Qatar & US convinced me of use of GTL
Just overheard someone comment that GTL looked like R
Use proc sgrender to put data and template together
GTL = graphics template language to make spiffy graphs A reason to get SAS 9.3
Ods graphics editor – stand alone free install from SAS website? Must check on this
Off to LABSUG I’d call my mom on the drive in but if she hears from me at this hour she’ll wonder who died
If you want to learn about LABSUG, you can find out more on the sascommunity.org site Los Angeles Basin SAS Users Group page