Date:         Mon, 24 May 2004 08:25:58 -0400
Reply-To:     Charles Patridge <charles_s_patridge@PRODIGY.NET>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Charles Patridge <charles_s_patridge@PRODIGY.NET>
Subject:      The May 2004 issue of the HASUG Flash is ready for viewing at
              http://www.hasug.org/newsletters.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

The May 2004 issue of the HASUG Flash is ready for viewing at
http://www.hasug.org/newsletters.

The second quarter HASUG meeting for 2004 is to be held on Thursday, May
27, 2004, 9:00 a.m. to noon at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Research Parkway,
Wallingford, CT.

Refreshments will be available at 8:30 a.m.

Please pre-register by Monday, May 24, 2004 for this meeting by completing
the short pre-registration form. If you have any questions, contact our host
(ess) by going to our Registration Page -
Click on this link to pre-register for next Meeting at
http://www.hasug.org/register.htm

Our Presenters and Their Topics are as follows:

Our first presenter will be Ron Cody, R.W. Johnson Medical School on the
new SAS V9 functions/regular expressions.

Perl regular expressions, implemented in SAS Version 9, provide a way to
perform pattern matching of text strings. This is a new capability to SAS
and is particular useful in reading very unstructured data. You have the
ability to search for text patterns, extract the patterns, or substitute
new patterns. Perl regular expressions along with dozens of new character
functions, give you enormous power to read and manipulate character data.
Dr. Ron Cody is a Professor in the department of Environmental and
Community Medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway,
New Jersey. He has been a SAS user since the late 70’s and is the author
of "Applied Statistics and the SAS® Programming Language" (fourth edition),
published by Prentice Hall. He has also authored or co-authored the
following books for the SAS Institute as part of their Books by Users
series: SAS Functions by Example (just published), The SAS Workbook, SAS
Programming by Example, Cody's Data Cleaning Techniques, and Longitudinal
Data and SAS: A Programmer's Guide. Ron has presented invited papers for
numerous local, regional, and national SAS conferences.

Our second featured presentation will be The Power of Proc Format by Jonas
Bilenas, JP Morgan Chase Bank. The abstract for this presentation is:

"The FORMAT procedure in SAS is a very powerful and productive tool.
Unfortunately, many beginning programmers rarely make use of them. The
FORMAT procedure provides a convenient way to do a table look-up in SAS.
User generated SAS FORMATS can be developed to assign descriptive labels
for data values, create new variables and find unexpected values. PROC
FORMAT can also be used to generate data extracts and to merge large data
sets without having to sort the large data sets. This tutorial will look at
how to set up user defined FORMATS, INFORMATS, and PICTURE FORMATS using
SAS 9.1. Many examples will be taken from a SAS-Book By User (BBU) with the
same title."

Jonas Bilenas has been using SAS on MVS, UNIX and PC platforms since 1986.
He has worked in risk management and marketing for the consumer credit card
industry. He has worked at Citigroup, American Express and is currently
employed by JP Morgan Chase Bank. His current endeavors are in experimental
design and pricing simulation/optimization.

Directions to the May 27th meeting at Bristol-Myers Squibb can be found at
http://www.hasug.org/directions/directions_bms.htm


Please help the HASUG Steering Committee by submitting your ideas and
suggestions for future topics by completing the online form at
http://www.hasug.org/hasug_ideas.htm.




Sincerely,

The Hartford Area SAS Users Group (HASUG) Steering Committee

PS.  At our May 2004 HASUG meeting, we will have our elections for members
of the Steering Committee.   We encourage each HASUG member to consider
joining the Steering Committee and help us to re-define the kind of Local
SAS User Group everyone is looking for.   Your ideas and suggestions are
always welcomed and encouraged.

In addition, the HASUG Steering Committee encourages each member to
consider presenting a topic to the membership to share your skills and
ideas with other SAS users.  It is an ideal opportunity to sharpen your
presentation skills as well as to meet new people who share your
interests.  Please consider presenting one of your applications, tips or
techniques at one of our future meetings.  Just contact a member of the
HASUG Steering Committee and we will assist you as much as possible to make
it a reality.