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The Business Intelligence Exchange (BIX) is a web-based library of custom tasks developed by SAS Business Intelligence users. These custom tasks can be used with Enterprise Guide as well as Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Custom tasks

SAS Business Intelligence products (for example, Enterprise Guide) come with a large number of built-in tasks for various data access, analysis and reporting needs. In addition, the SAS Business Intelligence platform provides a powerful framework for developing self-contained modules known as custom tasks.

The modules can be thought of as SAS macros with an attractive graphical user interface. Custom tasks are similar to SAS macros in that they input certain parameters, generate SAS code and create output or data sets. However, unlike regular SAS macros, custom tasks exhibit a number of useful features:

• Custom tasks are more "intelligent" and user-friendly than SAS macros.
• Custom tasks are easy to distribute and upgrade because multiple tasks can be stored in a single file.
• Finally, since custom tasks are similar to SAS macros, they require the same level of validation; for example, they can be validated using validation procedures for multiple-use SAS macros.