Quentin Tracker

Re: SAS Programming 1: Essentials Lesson 6 Activity p106a02.sas

Quentin — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:07:13 GMT

Your log looks fine to me. If you are concerned about:

 NOTE: Unable to open parameter catalog: SASUSER.PARMS.PARMS.SLIST in update mode. Temporary parameter values will be saved to 
 WORK.PARMS.PARMS.SLIST.

that note can be safely ignored. See e.g. discussion it related posts:
https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/NOTE-Unable-to-open-parameter-catalog-SASUSER-PARMS-PARMS-SLIST/td-p/975185

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Programming/Supressing-specific-log-message-NOTE-Unable-to-open-parameter/td-p/812316

Re: SAS Programming 1: Essentials Lesson 6 Activity p106a02.sas

Quentin — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:47:51 GMT

Immediately prior to this question, there is a prior activity "Create a Macro Variable (Required)". That step has the instructions for creating the macro variable &outpath.

As mentioned there in one of the options, you will need write access to this directory. If you don't know where you have write access, you could use:

%let outpath = %sysfunc(pathname(work));

That will write your output files to the temporary work directory used by your SAS session.

Re: Why I Still Trust This Community More Than Any AI Assistant

Quentin — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:21:29 GMT

@acordes wrote:

Looking ahead, I’m curious how you see the near future of coding and development in SAS. Will SAS provide its own RAG‑based “copilot” for Viya developers? And how do you think that will change the way we write, debug, and deploy SAS code or create reports or train and score models?

I'm not on Viya (sadly). But yes, SAS has already released SAS Viya Copilot: https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/SAS-Viya-Copilot-Tips-and-Tricks/ta-p/981845

You might also be interested in Joe Matise's presentation from SAS Innovate: https://github.com/matise-joe-norc/connect-saspy which will work with SAS 9.

Re: Microsoft Graph Email: Unable to Add Multiple Recipients via SAS Code

Quentin — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:22:46 GMT

This is not a complete answer, but you'll need to add some looping to generate the json array of email addresses.

You could try replacing your current line:

put '      { "emailAddress": { "address": "' addr +(-1) '" } }';

With a macro loop like below:

  %local i ;
  %do i=1 %to %sysfunc(countw(&to,%str( ))) ;
    %if &i>1 %then %do ;
      put "," ;
    %end ;
    put "      { ""emailAddress"": { ""address"": ""%scan(&to,&i,%str( ))"" } }";
  %end ;

That would allow you to pass a space-delimited list of email addresses.

Re: Understanding of &syscc

Quentin — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:17:55 GMT

There are papers that suggest syscc values 1-4 are warnings, and >4 are errors. But the documentation doesn't make that claim.

A SYSCC value of 0 at SAS termination indicates success for that operating environment. A nonzero value might indicate an error or warning condition.

https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/9.4_3.5/mcrolref/p11nt7mv7k9hl4n1x9zwkralgq1b.htm

I still use log scanning to catch error messages, warnings, and bad notes, and send myself those problematic messages. If you search lexjansen.com, there are tons of papers on log scanning if you want to see that approach.

Re: Find All Full Years Between Two Dates

Quentin — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:20:38 GMT

How do you want to handle the edge case of date_01=01/01/2023 date_02=12/31/2023? Do you want that to be considered a full year?

Re: PROC PRINTTO log truncated in background execution

Quentin — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:33:46 GMT

I think I would start by looking for the code for the OPTIONS statement that is turning off notes and source:

8927 options nonotes nosource nosyntaxcheck;

Is that the last thing you see in the log?

Is that options statement coming from your macro? User-written code? Is it being automatically generated by Studio?

It's definitely possible for a macro to turn off logging and forget to turn it back on at the end. But I can't think why that would only happen with a background submit.

Re: Display the box plot's outliers

Quentin — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:47:02 GMT

Assuming you're using SGPLOT with VBOX or HBOX, see the DATALABEL option:

https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/9.4_3.5/grstatproc/p1gylmjb4jaadfn1233wm4uzeb0e.htm#n1e5yepfne1f4zn137mttauqq7ti

Re: Why do unused class statement variables affect model parameter accuracy?

Quentin — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:59:33 GMT

If you have missing values for some of the CLASS variables, by default they will cause the record to be excluded from the analysis, even if that CLASS variable is not used in your model. When that happens, you should see a note in your output:

NOTE: 1 observation was deleted due to missing values for the response or explanatory variables.

You could add the /missing option to your CLASS statement, which would include explanatory variables with missing values in your model, giving them their own category. Or your macro could generate the appropriate list of CLASS variables.

Re: Wondering if it is possible the generation of ALT descriptions for SAS/GRAPH programmatically

Quentin — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:54:10 GMT

Assuming you don't find a SAS solution, you might suggest this as a product enhancement:

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Product-Suggestions/idb-p/product-suggestions

The LLM approach makes sense. I haven't tried SAS Viya Copilot, but I wonder if SAS could adapt it to generate alt-text from graph images (or I guess from the data used to generate the graph).

Re: Wondering if it is possible the generation of ALT descriptions for SAS/GRAPH programmatically

Quentin — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:16:19 GMT

@Ksharp the links your posted explain how to generate colorful graphs, but the question here is is there a way to automatically generate the ALT text that summarizes a graph (that would be displayed on hover, or for visually-impaired viewers with screen readers).

That's a pretty cool feature. I know SAS has done a lot of work on graphics accessibility, including translating graphs into audio representations: https://www.perkins.org/resource/sas-enables-visually-impaired-visualize-data/ . But I don't recall seeing anything that would automatically generate an alt-text summary of a graph.

Re: How to Reg on each row?! with Slope/Intercept saved out?!

Quentin — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:54:54 GMT

Agree with @PaigeMiller , use the same transpose approach provided in the other thread. Then you can run your regression like:

proc reg data=have;
  model y=x;
  by xahead;
run;

With statements added to output the parameters you want.

Re: How to Reg on each row?! with Slope/Intercept saved out?!

Quentin — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:24:03 GMT

**EDIT** I may have completely misunderstood your question. Can you describe your data, and show the regression you want to run?

What are the values [100 80 60 40 30 20 10 5] ? Are they counts? or Times?

Regardless, you should transpose your data to be vertical. It would have three columns, X Y Group. Where group is [100 80 60 40 30 20 10 5].

Then you could run PROC REG or whatever with a BY statement for group.

Rather than post a SAS dataset, it would be more helpful to post sample data a DATA step using the CARDS statement. You should also post the code you have tried, that will help people help you.

Re: Report with 1000 days from now

Quentin — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:51:54 GMT

Not sure if you're asking about how to generate the title, or the WHERE statement for filtering your data. Can you show an example of the code you have tried?

I would likely use the macro variables to store the start and end of the interval. You could calculate those like:

%let start= %sysfunc(intnx(day,%sysfunc(today()),-1000),date9) ;
%let end=   %sysfunc(intnx(day,%sysfunc(today()),-1000+15),date9) ;
%put &=start &=end ;

Re: problem with ODS in SAS EG 8.3

Quentin — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 21:00:25 GMT

Without code or a log we would be pretty much guessing at possibilities.

To start, would turn on system option MPRINT, and review your log for the PROC SURVEYFREQ step to make sure it completed successfully, that the input data did not have 0 obs, etc.

There shouldn't be anything special about running a PROC inside a macro. And shouldn't be a difference between the EG versions. So it's hard for me to guess what might be happening.

Re: problem with ODS in SAS EG 8.3

Quentin — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:13:55 GMT

Please share a small example of code that causes the problem. Please share the log from running that code. Also please explain the problem. Do you get errors in your log? Is the ODS output file not being created? etc.

Re: Create a catalog table

Quentin — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 17:07:24 GMT

If the library has SAS datasets in it, you should see the size. But it looks like the library points to CAS tables? It's possible the sashelp catalog won't know the size of the table. That often happens with libraries that point to relational databases as well. If you need to get the size of a CAS table, you might want to look at CAS-specific methods, see e.g. this thread: https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Viya/How-to-get-the-size-of-a-table-in-CAS/td-p/760880 .

Re: Combine the coding on arrays in the same data step

Quentin — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:22:51 GMT

@NewUsrStat wrote:
Could you please give me an example? Thank you very much!

Please note Tom's first answer. He already provided a full example, almost identical to Kathryn's.

Re: How to use a macro variable in a if else condition

Quentin — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:03:35 GMT

Sorry, my macro code will only work if the code is inside a macro definition.

Re: How to use a macro variable in a if else condition

Quentin — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:51:10 GMT

One of the key parts to learning the macro language is to learn the difference between %IF and IF.

If you want to use the macro language to decide which SAS code the macro will generate, you use the %IF statement.

It sounds like you might want:

%let cie=b2;

data class;
  format company $1.;
  set sashelp.class;
  
  %if &cie=b1 %then %do;
    company="A";
  %end;
  %else %if &cie=b2 %then %do;
    company="B";
  %end;
run;