Imagine you are given a list of major Canadian political donators and wish to load it into SAS for further analysis. The list is in a text file with fields delimited by tab characters. SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) offers wizards to automatically import a variety of file formats, but using these GUI’s preempts the chance for automation or additional processing during import. Using code to load data offers several advantages:

• Ability to redirect data to multiple data sets
• Ability to clean and modify data during load time
• Ability to delete unwanted data
• Portability and reusability

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When buying electronics, two factors remain relatively consistent -

1. If it’s new, it costs a lot more
2. If Sony is involved, it costs a lot more

Yet, even these two truisms fail to account the the $699cdn (roughly the same in American dollars) price tag placed on a (third-party!) Memory stick currently being advertised at Staples. Granted, 4GB cards are relatively new but can be obtained for less than $150 if you are fortunate enough to have an SD slot. Given Sony’s penchant for being proprietary and expensive, perhaps we should not be so hasty to give up on HD-DVD?
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