Genesee Valley SAS Users Group

Dear GVSUG Members,

Our Fall Meeting is only two weeks away! We’ll be getting together on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at the RIT Inn and Conference Center (address after the jump). As you can see we have just updated our web site, so anyone planning to attend may either use the form on our Contact Page or email me directly at joseph_guido@urmc.rochester.edu. This is so we can plan on the correct amount of food and beverage. We have a lot of exciting things for you at this meeting including, but not limited to:

1. The Icebreaker has returned – Mike Tomb – PROC Trivia (you will like this one…….)

2. Keynote Speaker – Mike Molter – Sr. SAS Programmer with INC Research, Raleigh NC.
“Tips and Tricks for Creating the Reports Your Clients Need to See”

3. Steve Lalonde, Associate Professor of Quality and Applied Statistics at RIT, Rochester NY
“ODS Statistical Graphics Enhancements in SAS version 9.2″

4. Mike Molter, Conference Chair for NESUG 2009 in Burlington, Vermont Sept 13-16, 2008.
“What NESUG has in store for YOU!” (Yes, our keynote speaker is the Conference Chair!)

5. Election of Officers for GVSUG (These are self nominated and will be voted on at meeting). As you can see we have several opening due to some attrition. You will have an opportunity at the meeting to nominate yourself for any position including Chair, Vice Chair, or Treasurer.

Chair – Joseph J Guido
Vice Chair – Michael Tomb
Treasurer – Janet Albright
At Large – Sue Greenberg
At Large – Sam Sanfratello
At Large – Adam Rains
At Large – Your Name
At Large – Your Name
At Large – Your Name
At Large – Your Name

6. Giveaways – Our meeting wouldn’t be complete without some giveaways!

7. GVSUG Logo judging contest. To date we have received five (5) logos and we will have these on display at the meeting (feel free to email any additional logo entries to me). The winner will receive a Pharmasug Conference Bag with all goodies included (nice!)

8. What Do You Want – Mike Tomb – Mike will facilitate a session where you (the membership) will give us your ideas for future talks, hands-on-sessions, etc.

9. Break/Networking Session – This is where we get to talk, eat, drink and discuss SAS issues.

Keynote Overview
Advanced reporting tools such as PROC REPORT have progressed by leaps and bounds in terms of options available to programmers for creating tables. Add to that the always-improving Output Delivery System (ODS) and it seems the sky is the limit for creating ready-for-delivery output straight from SAS. Just when we start believing this, reality exposes limitations. Templates, or shells of tables, including titles, footnotes, column headers, content, right down to the formatting, are designed to maximize readability, and to present the data in a way that allows the reader to make well-informed decisions and without regard to programming challenges. Unfortunately for programmers, such tables can’t always be generated with the basic tools everyone talks about.

In this presentation we will journey into some of the lesser know areas of PROC REPORT and ODS by looking at sample tables and identifying features that seem innocent on the surface, but require some innovation when the time comes to program them. Our journey will take us into PROC REPORT features such as ACROSS variables. We’ll go behind the scenes to see how a report is constructed, and ultimately, to the lesser known temporary variable. We’ll also get into certain ODS features such as styles, in-line formatting, and the use of destination-specific markup. At the end of our journey we will have solved the challenges presented in the samples. Along the way, we will have discovered some of the documentation hiding places of these and many other PROC REPORT and ODS facts.

Location
RIT Inn & Conference Center
5257 West Henrietta Road
W. Henrietta, NY 14586
(585) 359-1800

Hope to see you there.

Joe Guido,
Chair GVSUG