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Wonder why they are not calling? (Steven Palmer, Smith Hanley)

A review of a SAS BI training course, Querying Data and Running SAS Tasks Using the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office (D.J.Penix, Pinnacle Solutions)

  

Wonder why they are not calling?

 

Steven Palmer, Smith Hanley
spalmer@smithhanley.com



Bridging People, Technology and Knowledge
…Specialty Contract Staffing

Smith Hanley Consulting Group is a national recruiting firm specializing in business intelligence, technical, data management and statistical opportunities. We've been bringing People, Technology and Knowledge together for many of the country's leading companies for 25 years.

Quantitative Analysis and Programming
SAS and Statistical Programmers, Statisticians, Direct/Database Marketers, Marketing and Data Analysts

Information Technology
Data Warehousing/DSS, OLAP/Report Developers / ETL Specialist, DBAs/Data Architects and Administrators, Programmer/Analysts and Software Architects, ERP/CRM/HRIS/Web Systems

For more information about Smith Hanley, please visit their web site at www.smithhanleyconsulting.com or call 1-800-797-8287.

  
Wonder why they are not calling?

You've decided to begin a new job search. You've spent countless hours updating your resume. Had your best friend look it over and relished in the compliments on how it reads and looks. After applying to several positions, you wait patiently by the phone for all the calls to come in. After a week of no callbacks you wonder what THEIR problem is. After all, you have that "one of a kind," "stand out from the crowd" resume.

If you didn't know it already -- your resume looks like the other 20 received today for the same job.

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Review of a SAS BI training course


D.J. Penix, Pinnacle Solutions
dj.penix@psiconsultants.com

D.J.Penix (he is the one at left) is the President of Pinnacle Solutions, Inc, a SAS Alliance Member. He has been building custom SAS-based solutions for more than 15 years. D.J. created and launched the BI portal www.datagister.com which offers online demo versions of various SAS BI Server tools.

Querying Data and Running SAS Tasks Using the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office

This course, Querying Data and Running SAS Tasks Using the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, geared toward the business analysts with little or no SAS experience, focuses on using the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office to query SAS data and run common SAS analyses in either Word or Excel. For those that aren't familiar with the Add-In, it allows you to work with large SAS data sources directly in the Microsoft Office environment. You can also analyze your data using built-in SAS tasks and generate reports and output data sets -- all without writing a single line of code!

The initial focus of the course centers on opening and navigating SAS data sources in an Excel worksheet. Although Excel has a limit of 65,536 rows, the Add-In allows you to query very large SAS data sources by only displaying a specified number of rows at one time. The Add-In creates navigation tools inside Excel to view the entire SAS data source, say for example, 5000 rows at a time. Note that the data navigation capability is not available in Microsoft Word.

The course then moves into running SAS tasks (over 60 common "pre-packaged" analyses) to generate reports, output data, or both. Those familiar with the SAS tasks provided in SAS Enterprise Guide will immediately comprehend and easily browse through the material. Those that have never seen SAS tasks before, visualize a library of templates for various types of analysis that are wizard driven. Thus, the user doesn't need to know anything about SAS code.

Although you can also run these SAS tasks directly from Word, you must run them off of SAS data sources. Unlike Excel, you cannot run the tasks in Word from SAS data contained in Excel, or native Excel data sources. No problem though, you can always use the SAS Add-In to send your results to Word from Excel!

Before starting the course, I installed the SAS Add-In on my laptop (not required!) so that I could see how the lessons compared to me doing the real thing. The course contains 53 pages of material and SAS estimates 3 hours to complete it. I believe their estimate is on the high end and a 2.5 hour (or less) estimate is probably more realistic. I went at a fairly slow pace and spent extra time executing my own SAS Tasks on my laptop and still finished it in just under 3 hours.

With my new knowledge in hand, I set off to write this review in Microsoft Word. What better way to demonstrate the functionality than to run a sample SAS task within this document. I generated an example graph using the BAR CHART task and the SASHELP.AIR data set with just a few mouse clicks and no coding. Now that was easy!