Introduction

Pre-Conference Workshops

SESUG ‘99 will feature one and a half days of workshops — Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, and Monday morning. No matter what your level of SAS expertise, you’ll have a variety of workshops conducted by well-known SAS users and experts from which to choose. The Pre-Conference Workshop fees include training materials that will be distributed at the workshop.

A complete description of the Pre-Conference Workshops and biographies of the instructors can be found beginning on page 12 in the Registration Booklet. Sign up for your preference using the Conference Registration Form on pages 21-22 or via our on-line Registration.

SESUG ‘99 will feature one and a half days of workshops — Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, and Monday morning. No matter what your level of SAS expertise, you’ll have a variety of workshops conducted by well-known SAS users and experts from which to choose. The workshop fees include training materials that will be distributed at the workshop. Sign up for your preference using the Conference Registration Form on pages 21-22.

Do I need to sign up?

Yes.  All of these courses are considered "Pre-Conference Workshops" are there is a fee for each course.  Attendance is limited, so please sign up ahead along with your registration.

What are the costs?

Each of these workshops are for cost.  The $75 fee goes to pay for the equipment, the room and the instructor.

What if I change my mind?

If you have registered for a course and want to cancel your registration, we can accommodate the cancellation and provide a refund as long as the request for cancellation is received prior to September 8, 1999.  After that date, we will be unable to provide a refund for either the workshop or the conference.

If you would like to add your name to the list to attend a workshop but did not do so at the time of registration, you can still sign up ahead of time by contacting our registrar.  Click here for more information.

The Workshops

How do you solve problems in SAS coding? How do you approach a problem? How do you recognize when the code gives a good solution? How do you structure a SAS program for readability? These are some of the questions this course will tackle via example problems taken from SAS-L - the electronic SAS users group that meets almost every day around the world.

Most of the problems and their solutions will center around the DATA step, PROC SQL, and the macro facility. Books and classes typically teach how to use a particular tool - what are the options for PROC FREQ? What is a view? Etc. This course will work the other way around. Here is a problem. What are the relevant tools? Why is one solution better than another? How can you organize the program?

The student should have some knowledge of SAS/BASE - know something of writing DATA steps and manipulating data, be familiar with macro variables and the macro concept, and have at least a little acquaintance with PROC SQL. But more important than any specific knowledge, the student should be interested in SAS code, have a questioning mind, and be open to new ideas about SAS programs.

Ian Whitlock has been using SAS since 1981 and has a Ph.D. in Mathematics. Ian currenty works at WESTAT, Inc. in Rockville, MD.

Intelligent internet/intranet applications can be constructed utilizing Dynamic HTML and JavaScripts. This course will cover HTML, Dynamic HTML and JavaScript by taking the students through the steps required to create an interactive web application. Section one of the course will cover all aspects of HTML and allow you to confidently create static web pages. Section two of the course will cover all aspects of Dynamic HTML and the basics of using JavaScript to create interactive web pages that submit SAS jobs and create static web pages on the fly. The final section of the course will look at how to integrate HTML, Dynamic HTML and JavaScript to create an interactive and intelligent application.

A desire to show the ease with which HTML, Dynamic HTML, and JavaScript can be used to create static and dynamic web pages is the motivation of this seminar.

Intended audience:

All users who need to publish SAS output or data sets to Web and users who need to develop web based applications

Caroline Bahler has 20 years to SAS experience over a number of platforms and versions of SAS.

The Output Delivery System (ODS) in Version 7 of the SAS System controls the formatting of all procedure output. It has many great features and provides flexibility when working with output since each output is split into two component objects: (1) a data component and (2) a template component. The data object contains the raw data values for each piece of output while the template object contains how the piece of output should look. This workshop introduces ODS features and allows participants to explore how output attributes and controls are set; how output can be web enabled; how output is formatted specifying colors, fonts, and other stylistic characteristics; and how to create output data sets and RTF output files.

Kirk Paul Lafler is senior consultant and founder of Software Intelligence Corporation and is a SAS Institute Quality Partner with twenty two years SAS programming and training experience.

This workshop is for anyone who manipulates SAS data sets. It covers a wide range of topics such as subsetting, concatenations, the IN= data set option, FIRST.variable, one-to-one merges, match merges, and fuzzy merges.

The workshop starts with the basics and continues to build up to complex and tricky examples of data set manipulation. The only prerequisite for the course is a working knowledge of the SAS DATA Step. Yet, this workshop will give intermediate and advanced programmers a great review and some surprises. Come see what mysteries lurk in manipulating SAS files!

Mal Foley is a SAS Programmer/Analyst with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mal has worked with clinical trial data for the past 10 years, and survey research data for more than 20 years.

Since the introduction of SAS/IntrNet two years ago, SAS users and developers have started using the Internet and intranets for distribution of SAS reports and applications.

From static report publishing to intelligent fully interactive applications, there are now a wide range of options for the SAS software user and developer. Most of the papers and workshops presented to date have focused on individual tools to accomplish specific tasks. They have demonstrated how to develop applications using those tools. However, most SAS users and developers have a large number of applications that already exist. There has been little attention given to the tasks needed to web-enable all of these existing SAS applications.

This workshop will concentrate on the real world procedures needed to re-engineer existing SAS applications and make them web friendly. The workshop will include the steps needed to:

• take existing reports and web-enable them
• move SAS/AF applications to the web
• create fully interactive web frontends to existing SAS applications

This workshop is appropriate for Intermediate and Advanced level SAS users. It assumes that you understand SAS programming, but have no internet experience. While the workshop will include information about HTML and Java, you do not need experience with either to benefit from attending this workshop.

S. Dave Riba is a SAS bigot and has been using SAS longer than he will admit and has even been rumored to have programmed his wife’s sewing machine.

The generalized nature of SAS software almost guarantees that "n" programmers will develop at least "n" unique solutions to even basic tasks. The gap between the task correctly performed by the programs and the disparate code is, for the most part, due to programming style. This workshop discusses a set of generalized programming style guidelines useful to both experienced and novice SAS programmers.

We first investigate general principles of program design, those aspects of the analysis and coding process common to all aspects of SAS programming. The next sections focus on coding guidelines for the DATA step and procedures. Finally, debugging techniques are addressed from both behavioral and technical, "how-to" viewpoints.

The style guidelines presented here promote "defensive" coding techniques, which result in more maintainable and "bulletproofed" products. The workshop emphasizes Base SAS through Version 6.12. The analysis and design principles it promotes, however, are highly applicable to other SAS products and Versions.

Frank DiIorio is an author of two SAS programming books and has used SAS for 23 years.

To survive in today’s market, companies must effectively use analytic tools and methodologies to maintain their competitive edge. Pioneered by the credit card industry, target marketing is now being embraced by retail banks, insurance companies, telcos, hotels and resorts, retail and catalog businesses, energy companies and more. The use of predictive models has proven to be one of the most powerful methodologies for improving the company’s bottom line.

This workshop will begin with an overview of data mining techniques used in marketing. This will include a brief description and examples of the numerous statistical techniques used in marketing. The second half of the workshop will detail the steps for building a predictive model. It will begin with defining the objective function. Next steps will include data preparation, variable preparation, model development and validation. It will conclude with business benefits and implementation strategies.

If you are an analyst wanting to learn about target marketing and modeling techniques or a manager wanting to understand how these methods can improve your bottom line, please plan to attend this workshop.

C. Olivia Rud has been involved in data mining and modeling for nearly 10 years and has worked in the predictive modeling for acquisition, customer management, retention, risk and profitability.