MWSUG 2012 - Minneapolis, MN

Last week I got to spend a few days in Minneapolis, Minnesota for the MidWest SAS Users Group (MWSUG).  This was my first users group conference that I have ever attended.  It was not a bad experience; I am very glad that I went.

The conference offered pre-conference trainings.  If the training that you are interested in is offered, these are much better values that taking the regular course at a SAS training center.

The users groups also offer a chance to take the SAS certification exams.  This is also better value, for they offer a 20% discount for taking it at such conferences.  I took an exam.  Unfortunately, I did not pass.  I was allowed to miss 21 questions.  I missed 22.  Lame.

There is a lot of good information for all kinds of SAS users from statisticians to clinical programmers to JMP users to beginning SAS users.  Proceedings from the conference can be found here.  I am mostly a clinical programmer, so a lot of the material presented did not apply to me at this point in my career.  I do look forward to attending PharmaSUG in Chicago in May 2013.  This will be entirely aimed towards clinical statisticians and programmers.

Here are some highlights that I got from the MWSUG 2012 conference:

• Use PROC APPEND in place of a DATA step with a SET statement.
• Some programming techniques to make programming more efficient:
• Use the keep=, drop=, or where= option in a set statement instead of using the KEEP, DROP, or WHERE statements in a DATA step
• Turn off the macro facility when not needed
• Use the OBS= option in the SET statement
• PROCs with a CLASS statement do not need to be sorted beforehand
• The FILE statement in a DATA step has the option to email output directly to a recipient.  This saves time in creating permanent output and then attaching to an e-mail.  It can also send updates on how processes are going if you run a program while out of the office.
• SG Procedures look like a very easy way to create graphs now.  If only I had SAS 9.3.  We are working on upgrading in the next month.  Wahoo!
• Have a place for internal code and production code.  Internal code does not need to be nearly as fancy as production code.  This can help produce sufficient results for management quickly.  If they need it for a production, then you can take time to make it look more presentable.
• Take advantage of  communities.sas.com.

The next conference will be held in Columbus, Ohio on September 22-24, 2013.  Enjoy!