Monday, 17 May 2010

NOTE: SAS Editor Shortcuts (DMS only)

I stumbled across a very interesting paper the other day. Not only was it written (with others) by my old friend John (H) King but it spoke about something I've never explored before: customising the Display Manager (DMS). The paper is entitled "Automagically Copying and Pasting Variable Names" and was presented at Coders' Corner at this year's SAS Global Forum (SGF) in Seattle.

The paper describes two methods that use some less well known base SAS techniques that let you easily build tools to accomplish common tasks. One method lets users right-click on a file in a SAS explorer window and then select a task from a menu. The other lets you assign a key that, when pressed, gives you or your users a way to specify a one or two-level filename and then run a particular task on the file. Both methods give you an easy way to accomplish virtually any task, process or analysis.

Recommended reading!