March 2024

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When you include pre-conference courses or tutorials on your conference itinerary, you can use your SAS Training Points to pay for registration. Sign up now.

Dear Reader:

Yes, we’re still making much of SAS Innovate, our data and AI-focused event next month in Las Vegas and our only in-person event of this kind this year. You can now peruse the lineup of Super Demos. Got SAS Training Points? They now count toward your registration. Group pricing is another way to get a discount – $250 each when you register 5 or more people.

Read on to get familiar with SAS^® Viya^® Workbench, see what’s next for SAS^® Enterprise Guide for SAS^® 9 and SAS^® Viya^®, peruse upcoming learning events and much more.

Finally…for grins: Take this quiz to find out what type of SAS user you are. 😉

Beverly Brown
Editor, Tech Report

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SAS Viya Release Highlights
Learn about new capabilities in SAS for Microsoft 365, SAS Studio, SAS Model Manager and SAS Information Governance, improvements to SAS Visual Analytics and details about the SAS Enterprise Guide integration with SAS Viya.

New: SAS Enterprise Guide connects with SAS Viya 4
Based on customer feedback, SAS Enterprise Guide is now a bridge for existing projects and code workflows as you adopt SAS Viya. A free learning event led by SAS’ Wilbram Hazejager, blog post by SAS’ Chris Hemedinger and Wilbram’s SAS Support Community article detail how they work together.

Free on-demand learning event: SAS Viya Workbench
SAS’ Joe Madden shows you how to create high-performance models in your preferred language: SAS, Python or R.

How to use an LLM-based digital assistant for SAS Optimization
SAS’ Julia Moreno reveals how to address a common manufacturing optimization scenario using a SAS Optimization model. Using natural language conversation, you’ll learn to use generative AI to build a digital assistant that interacts with the model.

Getting started with Python integration to SAS Viya for predictive modeling
SAS’ Melodie Rush shows you how to fit a decision tree and use your decision-tree model to score new data.

Set a background color for spanned header in PROC REPORT: ODS Excel destination
Kathryn McLawhorn of SAS Tech Support shares a tip to give you greater control of background colors in your PROC REPORT tables, especially when targeting Excel output.

Program the Number-Word Game in SAS using the WORDSw. Format and LENGTH function
SAS’ Rick Wicklin shows how English speakers can use a special SAS format to automate a simple game. Non-English speakers need to do a little more work, but Rick demonstrates how to play the game in Spanish and in Klingon, a fictional language from the Star Trek universe.

New developer portal
Go check out the revamped developer portal at developers.sas.com. The new site co-exists alongside the current site until we get all the redirects worked out. On the new site you can find the SAS Viya API documentation, developer-related use cases, open-source integration resources and much, much more.

SESUG 2024 abstracts accepted through April 22
Submit your paper abstracts through Mon., April 22 for SESUG 2024, Sept. 22-24 in Bethesda, MD. Check out the new and revised Academic Sections to see where your idea might fit best. No time to prepare an actual paper? New this year is the Quick Hit format. Any submission can request a 10-minute “Quick Hit” slot, and papers are always optional for these presentations.

How Do I Clean My Data Using SAS Programming?
Join SAS’ Jacqueline Johnson at 11:00 a.m. ET on Tues., April 2 to explore programming tips and tricks for cleaning your data using SAS programming.

Why Do I Need SAS Intelligent Decisioning and SAS Model Manager to Achieve Analytics Success?
Join SAS’ Crystal Baker and Sophia Rowland at 11:00 a.m. ET on Tues., April 9 to explore how the integration between these SAS solutions helps MLOps engineers, data scientists and business users improve analytics success by working together.

From Zero to SAS: Using SAS Tasks to Summarize and Manipulate Your Data?
Join SAS’ Tom Grant at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., April 25 to learn how nonprogrammers today use SAS Studio to accomplish many of the same data-cleaning tasks analysts used to spend 80% of their time on before they could even start the analytics process.