Welcome to the SAS for the Macintosh Resource Page. SAS is a large and powerful program for managing and analyzing data; the Mac is a computer that does an amazing amount of stuff. This page is about the intersection of the two. The goal of this page is to provide information and resources to support users of SAS on the Macintosh. But now with changing time, SAS window looks different on different operating systems like Windows, MAC, etc. This provides a scope for customization of the SAS environment. However, there are many common elements in various operating environments. Now, in SAS Programming Tutorial, we will cover the SAS Windows in detail: i. Hello All, As a newbie to creating macro's i was hoping for a tad of help if you please: i want to identify certain text that meets conditions, one being that i have an extensive list of values in a dataset that are 'keywords' as such. Rather than using%let Colour = 'BLUE' 'RED' etc, i was.
SAS Global Forum ended two weeks ago. I thought by now someone would have written about SAS on the Mac and saved me the trouble, but since I don’t see much discussion of this in the blogosphere, here are my belated two cents.
If you have been using SAS as long as I have, then you probably know that running SAS on a Mac is nothing new. SAS Institute released SAS for the Mac lo these many years ago, but then dropped it just a couple years later because there weren’t enough users (read licenses) to justify it. And since then, of course, Mac users have gotten several different products that allow them to run Windows software. So anyone who really wants to run SAS on a Mac has had that ability for a while.
Given that history, the last thing I expected to see at the Opening Session was a demo of SAS on the Mac–much less on the iPad.
Of course, this is not the same SAS for the Mac that was dropped so long ago. This is the SAS Web Editor.
The SAS Web Editor is a nimble version of Display Manager that runs in a browser (any HTML 5 compliant browser). I learned about it just over a month ago when my husband mentioned to me, as we ate dinner, that he had read an interesting blog describing the SAS Web Editor. Thank you to AnnMaria deMars for getting the word out! Here is an official press release from SAS Institute dated March 6, 2013. The SAS Web Editor is a client-server application. The editor is the client. To use it, you must have SAS running on some server. That server can be local or remote. Considering how aggressively SAS Institute has promoted cloud computing over the last decade, it is perhaps surprising that it has taken this long to come up with Display Manager for the Web. The SAS Web Editor feels like a missing link. It makes a lot of sense.
Here are some specifics from the Opening Session. They used the SAS Web Editor in a browser on the Mac to access VMware to run SAS for Linux on the same Mac. Then they demoed the SAS Web Editor on an iPad (pictured above) which also used the Mac as its server. (Currently academic users of the SAS Web Editor use SAS Institute’s servers. Maybe for the opening session they were concerned about slow connection speeds to Cary. Given the complaints I’ve heard about the internet service at the Moscone Center, this is easy to believe.)
Of course, you can use the SAS Web Editor on Windows (which is what I am doing). So I find it interesting that they chose to demo it on Apple hardware. Not only did they show Macs and iPads in the Opening Session, but I saw a lot of iPads being used by SAS staff at the conference. I think this was a smart move for SAS Institute. Firstly, there is an undeniable Cool Factor associated with Apple hardware that can only help SAS’s reputation. At the present, SAS is loosing the battle for the academic market. Maybe this will help turn the tide. Secondly, this is a good time to distance oneself from Windows. This fact was underscored for me by an article in last week’s Economist magazine titled “Microsoft blues: Windows 8 is only the beginning of Microsoft’s problems.”
A few other interesting tidbits about the SAS Web Editor: It is not exactly the same as Display Manager, but the developers showing it in the Demo Room made it clear that they are working hard to get the kinks out. It is currently available only for academic use, but in the Opening Session it was said that it will be available as a free download–no mention of when. They also mention that it will be available for Android platforms.
You can still view the Opening Session online. The SAS Web Editor demo starts around 1 hour in.
Welcome!
Welcome to the SAS for the Macintosh Resource Page.
SAS is a large and powerful program for managing and analyzing data; the Mac is a computer that does an amazing amount of stuff. This page is about the intersection of the two.
The goal of this page is to provide information and resources to support users of SAS on the Macintosh. I used SAS on the Mac regularly from mid-1997 until August 1999; I am now working as an application developerin SAS under Windows. I still use both SAS and the Mac OS, it's just that I rarely use them together anymore.
To contact me, email scocca@pobox.com.Let me know if you have any suggestions for additions or changes, some breaking news, or some information you think other Mac SAS users might benefit from seeing.
News:
Minor Update to Mac OS SAS
As part of their Y2K fix rollout, SAS released a minor bug-fix update to SAS for Mac OS. This release identifies itself as 6.12 TS051; SAS has a Fix list on their website. The Mac OS FAQ on their site says that themost recent release is TS070, but as far as I can tell this is incorrect and TS051 is as recent as it gets.
Sas Mac Os
Future of SAS under Mac OS
The most frequent question I get from visitors to this page is about thefuture of SAS under Mac OS. SAS for Mac OS is still only available inversion 6.12, although on most other platforms the current release of SASis version 8.2. SAS has stated that there will be no Mac OS release ofVersion 8, however they have not yet added the Mac to their official listof platforms for which no future development is being done.
As for Mac OS X, SAS 6.12 for Mac OS is not a Carbon-compliantapplication. According to SAS,V6.12 will run under the “Classic” environment of Mac OS X. There are nocurrent plans to issue a newer version of SAS for Mac OS.
It is possible that there will someday be another version of SAS underMac OS. Mac OS has not been added to the official list ofplatforms for which there is no longer any development taking place. Sincethere was once a release of SAS for the NeXT platform, some of the basicgroundwork for a Mac OS X port may already be in place. In addition, SAShas a strong record of supporting and developing for Unix systems and hasrecently released SAS for Linux. So while they are not releasing Mac OSversions now, SAS has by no means become a Windows-only vendor.
I am disappointed, but I cannot fault SAS for this decision. They madethe effort to produce a Mac OS version in the first place, and the decisionto stop making new releases was a financial one based on a relative lack ofrevenue from Mac OS licenses. This is in part a reflection of the scarcityof Mac OS in the business world; while Mac users in higher education tookadvantage of SAS, there was very little corporate use of the product. Since the vast majority of SAS revenue comes from corporate licensing, itwas not financially reasonable for them to continue with the Mac OSversion. I sincerely hope that over the next few years the market willshift so that SAS decides a Mac OS release will be profitable; if thathappens, I feel comfortable that SAS will choose to take advantage of thepotential revenue stream.
Version 8 Under Virtual PC
One alternative that still exists, especially if you mostly use SASoccasionally, is to run the Windows version of SAS using an emulator suchas Virtual PCfrom Connectix. I did this for a while (in 1998 and 1999) with Virtual PCversion 2 and SAS Version 7 on a Power Mac G3/233 desktop. Performance wasnot quite good enough to work comfortably with SAS for any length of time,but SAS programs executed reasonably well and I was able to use theemulation well enough to create screen shots for the documentation I waswriting at the time.
Both Virtual PC and Apple hardware have increased in speed since that time, while as far as I know SAS has not gotten significantly slower. Thus, it may well be that Virtual PC 4 on G4 hardware provides a good enough user experience to use that as a means of running the current version of SAS under Mac OS. Anyone who has tried the Virtual PC/ SAS combination on a newer Mac is invited to let me know how well it works; I will try to post any results or comments that I get to help you know if this would be an acceptable choice for your situation.
SAS AppleScripts Available Here!
Here are two script packages to make SAS on the Mac easier to run. Click on the icon (or select the substitute link in non-graphical browsers) to download the package described. In some browsers, you may want to option-click to download the files. (These script packages should work properly with SAS 6.12 and with SAS 6.10.)
TheDrop SAS script (49K) allows you to run a SAS program in 'batch mode' bydropping the program file onto the script icon. The current version is1.0.1, which is simply version 1.0 with improved documentation.
William Lisowski generously updated the BBEdit SAS ScriptPackage (176K) to work with BBEdit 6.0, which has a newscripting interface which caused the BBEdit 4.0 scripts to fail.
The BBEdit SAS Script Package (74K) allows you to use BBEdit 4.0 from Bare Bones Software as a front endfrom SAS. The main script lets you submit a SAS job and view the outputfrom within BBEdit. Other scripts let you use standard Mac dialog boxes toselect files or folders and then automatically insert the full directorypath into your program.
Each script package is a binhexed self-expanding Stuffit archive (i.e.,a .sea.hqx file).
Some Reports
I've written some brief reports on some topics of interest or utility to SAS users on the Macintosh.
Additional Notes
PROC MIXED Performance Notes
The performance notes formerly in this space have been removed, and the project to set up a benchmarking process for Mac SAS to see what affects performance has been put on a back burner. It turns out that the vastly different time requirements for PROC MIXED on two machines were due to a slight variation in the PROC MIXED code rather than to machine configurations. This variation did not affect the estimates produced by SAS, but did increase run time up to twentyfold.
The difference involves the form of the RANDOM statement. The“fast” version usedand the “slow” version usedwhere x1 and x2 are class variables. These are the same model; theyproduce the same estimates. However, the difference in computation time issignificant. Somewhat confusingly, SAS documentation suggests that thesecond method can actually be faster!
It turns out that the key is the number of levels of the class variable. In my test data, x1 had five levels (x2 had about 45 levels, and there were about 2000 observations). It turns out that factoring out x1 (as shown in the second example) is faster only if x1 has a relatively large number of levels. If x1 has a small number of levels, factoring out x1 can, as I saw, greatly increase the execution time.
This is not Mac specific (similar increases show up under Solaris), but it's worth knowing if you use PROC MIXED.
Some Links
Here are some links to parts of the SAS web site of particular interestto Mac users:
Sas For The Macbook Air
- The main page for SAS TechnicalSupport.
- AdministratorDocumentation for the Mac.
- The GeneralMac FAQ list.
- The Mac FileTransport FAQ list.
- The Mac FTP DownloadArea, including the SAS Tools application and a couple of bugfixes.
- The Mac Usage NotesDownload Area, with Mac usage notes in export file format.
Feedback
Let me know what you think of this site via email (scocca@pobox.com).
Disclaimer
Sas Macro Variable
In maintaining these pages, I do not work for or speak on behalf of SAS.
SAS and the SAS System are trademarks of SAS. Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer. Other brand and productnames used herein are trademarks of their respective companies.
This page was developed on Macintosh, using Alpha 6.5and Color It! 3.2.
Sas For Macbook
Page last updated 7/21/1.