Tuesday, May 24, 2005

 

9.2 and Outsource

I caught up with Wayne Hester today who was a Systems Developer for the Output Delivery & Reporting of SAS Institute. Wayne specialized in the RTF. Currently, there are no plans to support the MSWord (.doc) format but there will be continued support and further development for RTF. The new features being developed for SAS 9.2 is a new ODS engine for “tagsets”. Instead of the statement:

ODS RTF

It will be:ODS TAGSETS.RTF

Many of the features of the new tagsets are similar to the old ODS RTF engine but there are some enhancements. For example, there is more support on the control over the height spacing between lines. An example:

PROC TEMPLATE
STYLE PARKSKUP from PARSKIP / FONT= (“Arial”, 72 pt);

If there are so many variables and the output wraps around into panels, the new ODS engine has a better calculation algorithm to do a best fit of the panels according to the header and footer is displayed. There are also greater control over the use of styles to control font color, super script and special character.

TITLE “test *{style for ground=red *{super *{Unicode ALPHA}”;

In this example, the asterisk is the ODS escape character signifying the instructions for the style.

I spoke to Himesh Patel who was the director of Data Visualization on some of the development of ODS Graph for 9.2. Many of the statistical procedures that were had ODS graphics experimental for 9.1 will become production for 9.2. There were also three new PROC in SAS GRAPH. This included PROC GBARLINE, SGPLOT and SGMATRIX. The SGMATRIX generates multiple paned scatter and histogram graphs without the need to do a PROC GREPLAY.

There was also a new ODS Graph Editor that allows you to edit your graph after it is produced. It is an interactive editor which you can alter titles and highlight data points. Things that you may have done in annotate can now be edited in this fashion. The graph files in this case are stored in PNG format. There was also a new GRAPH Studio Designer which is going to be experimental in version 9.2. It generates nice PROC TEMPLATE code to lay out multiple graphs on one page.

Last year, PharmaSUG tried out a new format of doing a panel discussion on CDISC. It was a success so there was a few more panel discussion this year. I helped host a panel today on how outsourcing will affect SAS programmers. There were some questions on how offshore companies handle the time differences. Andrew Fagan did agree that there is some challenge in having an immediate feedback on questions from the whole team when they are on a different time zone. The audience asked if there are any specific guidelines or regulations from the FDA on outsourcing. There did not seem to be any one that knew about. There were also concerns on security of data. A solution that Marty Rosenberg suggested was to have the data stored on local servers and the outsource vendors log in remotely. As a whole, there were a lot of interest in this topic but people were very filled with concerns.

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