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In this issue
SAS Business Intelligence at MWSUG 2005
New Enterprise Guide book (Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche,
The
Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 3.0)
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SAS Business Intelligence at MWSUG 2005
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Alex Dmitrienko, Eli Lilly and Company
The Midwest
SAS Users Group (MWSUG) conference took place on October
9-11 in Cincinnati, OH.
I was planning to attend the conference and prepared three
papers to talk about SAS Business Intelligence solutions with
emphasis on SAS Enterprise Guide (in fact, I was supposed
to be an invited speaker). However, due to a series of unexpected
events, I was unable to attend the conference. To make up
for the lost opportunity, I have decided to post my three
MWSUG papers on the BISUG web site and make them available
to hundreds of BISUG members around the world.
SAS Enterprise Guide in Pharmaceutical Applications: Automated
Analysis and Reporting
Enterprise Guide offers an impressive selection of standard
data manipulation and analysis tasks and provides a framework
for developing new custom tasks. Due to an increasing demand
to streamline routine data management and output generation
tasks in the pharmaceutical world, Enterprise Guide will likely
become one of the main tools for a broad group of pharmaceutical
professionals involved in the so-called AAAA processes (data
acquisition, aggregation, access and analysis), i.e., information
technology, data management, statistics, etc. This paper describes
how pharmaceutical companies can utilize Enterprise Guide
to build systems for automating statistical analysis and reporting.
Download the paper
SAS Enterprise Guide: Introduction to stored processes
and custom tasks
This paper provides a high-level overview of main features
of stored processes and custom tasks and discusses development/installation
procedures (it actually focuses on custom tasks). It also
provides useful information for custom task developers, for
example, describes the underlying data model, how custom tasks
interact with the SAS System and how to build custom task
using Microsoft Visual Basic or other languages.
Download the paper
Introduction to SAS Business Intelligence/Enterprise Guide
This paper is a tutorial that provides an overview of new
SAS Business Intelligence solutions, including Enterprise
Guide, Addin for Microsoft Office and Web Report Studio, and
focuses on the most popular of them, Enterprise Guide. Enterprise
Guide has attracted much attention in the SAS user community
because it offers an intuitive point-and-click interface and
provides the user with a large number of standard data manipulation/summary
tools. This paper introduces Enterprise Guide 3.0 (in my presentation
I was also planning to talk about the new version that will
be rolled out later this year (Enterprise Guide 4.1). It summarizes
main features of this product such as Enterprise Guide tasks,
project-centered programming, etc. This paper also demonstrates
how SAS users can efficiently transition to the user-friendly
environment provided by Enterprise Guide and increase their
productivity by taking advantage of its unique tools.
Download the paper
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New Enterprise Guide book
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Alex Dmitrienko, Eli Lilly and Company
Susan Slaughter (left) and Lora Delwiche are known to thousands
of SAS users as the authors of The
Little SAS Book. This book has been through at least
three editions and is recognized as a must read for those
of us who are new to SAS.
This year Susan and Lora have been working on another book.
The book's title is The
Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 3.0 and it is aimed
at a different audience, users of SAS Enterprise Guide.
SAS Press asked me to review the new book, so I had the
pleasure of reading the book before its official publication
(which is scheduled to take place in December 2005). I found
it very useful and informative.
Very briefly, Susan and Lora applied the successful formula
of The Little SAS Book. Their new book provides a lot of
useful introductory material for Enterprise Guide novices
with and without SAS programming skills and also includes
a good number of tidbits for users who have Enterprise Guide
2.0 and 3.0 experience.
To make the book attractive to experienced and inexperienced
users, Susan and Lora broke it into two parts. Part
I (Tutorials) explains what Enterprise Guide is about and
shows how the reader can achieve simple results in this
new environment. It is non-technical, user-friendly and
will be appreciated by people who are not familiar with
SAS software products and by SAS users who are new to Enterprise
Guide's click-and-point interface. Part II (Reference) is
a systematic and more technical overview of Enterprise Guide
features. It covers data management, generation of simple
and more sophisticated tabular and graphical reports and,
lastly, it introduces statistical procedures in Enterprise
Guide.
We are planning to include an interview with Susan and Lora
in the November or December issue of the BISUG newsletter.
The following is an excerpt from the Authorline interview
with Susan Slaughter and Lora Delwiche (I would like to
thank Shelly Goodin of SAS Press for sharing the Authorline
interview with me).
What was your motivation for writing your book?
Susan Slaughter: We wanted to write a book that would help
people learn SAS Enterprise Guide. SAS Enterprise Guide
is a point-and-click application so there are many things
you can do immediately -- open SAS data sets and run reports,
for example -- but there are also things that are less intuitive,
and, until you understand some basic concepts, you'll never
be comfortable with SAS Enterprise Guide. By explaining
the concepts and giving clear examples, we hope to make
it easy for people to reach a high level of expertise quickly.
Who are you targeting with your book?
Lora Delwiche: We wrote this book for anyone who is new
to SAS Enterprise Guide, both for experienced SAS programmers
and people who have never used the SAS System. We haven't
assumed any particular educational background or industry.
Susan Slaughter: We do show how to produce basic statistics;
but, in order to interpret statistical results, people should
have had a relevant course in statistics.
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