Business Intelligence Consultants

Viewing Reports using SAS Web Report Studio

Geoff Weatherall, Pinnacle Solutions Geoff Weatherall is Senior Analyst/Programmer at Pinnacle Solutions, Inc, a SAS Alliance Member. He has been designing and building custom SAS-based solutions for a multitude of clients internationally for more than 20 years.

The target audience for this course, Viewing Reports using SAS Web Report Studio, is the Business Analyst who would have very little or no SAS programming experience. The focus of the learning is viewing reports using the SAS Web Report Studio tool. All the reports are prepared from pre-defined data sources using a common web user interface. This empowerment has rarely been possible for so many people in an organization without having to write a line of code.

The objective of this course is give individual lessons to enable a good base knowledge of the following aspects:

* Log on to SAS Web Report Studio
* Identify common report features
* Open, view, Modify data items in a report
* Save a report
* View a quick report
* Export a report
* View the output of a stored process

The course contains 38 pages of lessons including slideshows, simulated software and course text, with SAS suggesting that it will take about 2 hours to complete. I found that without rushing through the material this lesson took approximately one and a half hours and that I had given myself ample time to absorb all the detailed aspects cover in the material. However it will take longer to complete if you wish to print and annotate notes from every page and example.

The training is built to the same style and quality as other E-Learning courses offered by SAS Institute. The real bonuses I found were the slideshows and interactive elements to aid understanding and concepts in performing the required step in a task. The participant is guided through each objective task by very simple explanatory steps of viewing, modifying and saving a web based report.

The textual descriptions, slideshows and interactive elements are interspersed with practices and occasional short quizzes at the end of a learning section, which ensures the participant has had time to get familiar with using the tools covered. Although I have always found that using the actual tools with real data is the best training, SAS have found the next best thing.

Another aspect I like with this kind of course is that basic training can be covered at a relatively inexpensive cost, and the time scales that you are given to complete the course material are great, as training does not have to be pushed aside due to ever increasing employer project demands.

In my opinion this course would be very useful for all levels of experienced professionals from Business Analysts to Executives. At last a piece of intuitive software that will allow personnel from all levels of the corporate scale to access, and report their data easily!

Enterprise Guide 4.1: Interview with Chris Hemedinger

Alex Dmitrienko: The EG community is quite eager to take a look at the upcoming EG release. When is it planned to be shipped to the users?
Chris Hemedinger: Very soon! We have completed the development and testing cycle, and it is in the final stages of release preparation. I expect that it will be available by the time your readers see this interview. Note however, that existing Enterprise Guide users may need to ask for a distribution -- it won't be shipped to them automatically. Contact your SAS site representative to arrange for that.

AD: I remember seeing a functional version of EG 4.1 at SUGI 30 in Philadelphia. Why is it taking so long to release it?
CH: You are correct; we have had a good stable version of Enterprise Guide 4.1 in the works for a long time. While we have continued to test and improve the features we previewed at SUGI last year, we have also been integrating the product with other products here at SAS. These integration points are tied to a new version of the SAS Business Intelligence Server, along with an updated service pack for SAS Foundation (SAS 9.1.3 Service Pack 4). The SAS BI Server and SP4 are just now being released as well; the SAS Enterprise Guide release is coordinated with those.

AD: You indicated in your Sep 2004 interview that your group had to develop EG 3.0 virtually from scratch to take advantage of a new Microsoft development platform (.NET platform). I hope you did not have to go through all of this with EG 4.1.
CH: What we've done is continue to build on the work we did for the 3.0 release. We have continued to take advantage of the .NET framework capabilities as well as add some exciting new features. The 3.0 release was mostly about bringing the product forward to a new technology and introducing some big user interface changes. In the 4.1 release, the user interface changes are more subtle and we've added many more new features.

AD: Is EG 4.1 going to be shipped free of charge to all users with a PC SAS 9.1 license just like EG 3.0?
CH: Yes, any customer who licenses SAS 9 for Windows (Workstation) will receive Enterprise Guide. As I mentioned, existing customers who already have it in-hand will probably need to request a distribution to get the latest.

AD: I think the time has come to ask questions about new features in EG 4.1. One of the things that I found most impressive during an EG 4.1 demo at SUGI 30 was report integration. Can you tell me a bit more about it?
CH: This is one of our most exciting new features. Beginning with this release of products, we've really got our reporting infrastructure put together so that our key clients (Enterprise Guide, SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, SAS Web Report Studio, and others) can all share report definitions. A key to this capability begins with the SAS Foundation (BASE SAS) layer, where ODS has added a SAS Report target. EG, the Add-In, and Web Report Studio are all capable of rendering these reports from ODS.
Enterprise Guide has the added capability of manipulating these reports so that you can annotate them with your own text, images, and formatting -- including arranging output in ways previously not possible without extensive SAS programming. You can then take your output from Enterprise Guide and publish it to share with Web Report Studio users, creating dynamic or static reports for a wider audience of end users.
From within Enterprise Guide, these reports are very printer-friendly. You can easily view the report as a continuous flow (similar to HTML) or as page views (similar to PDF), where the table headers repeat across pages in ways that make sense (try that with HTML!).

AD: The list of new features is quite long (there are 10 or more new tasks, some re-designed tasks). Can you tell about a couple of new features you find very important?
CH: I'll try to be brief, but it's going to be difficult :)

- Support for Information Maps -- Enterprise Guide can open relational Information Maps and import them into your project. It does this by using the new INFOMAP libname engine provided in SAS 9.1.3 Service Pack 4.

- Enhanced report capabilities (as I just discussed)

- "Linking" items within a process flow -- this allows you to "draw" a line to connect items to ensure they run in a specified order. This seems subtle, but I think this will be a boon to SAS programmers who want to insert SAS programs between two tasks, or chain multiple programs together. (Bonus: you can now print the process flow diagram!)

- Create a stored process from a flow -- This lets you take the work in your project flow and translate it in entirety to a stored process. It also picks up on project parameters (macros defined at the project level -- another new feature) and promotes them into stored process parameters. This makes the work of creating a stored process almost trivial once you have your project flow working the way you want!

- Export/Send mail as a step -- you can now insert tasks that export results or send results as e-mail within your project flow, so that when you rerun the project or flow those steps are automatically run as well. This greatly simplifies the process of automated distribution.

There are so many more great new features, including new tasks and wizards, new integration with other products from SAS, and many user interface tweaks and improvements.

AD: By the way, I have heard some EG users complain about changes in the upcoming release, including changes in the Query Builder task. The learning curve they faced with EG 3.0 was apparently quite steep and now they feel that they will need to go back to Square 1 because some tasks were re-designed. Should they be concerned about this?
CH: Of the existing Enterprise Guide features, the Query Builder has undergone the most dramatic change. It's one of the most-used features of the product, and it was time for an "extreme makeover". The new design is based on extensive usability work by our internal designers and incorporates feedback from our existing customers as well new users. The basic approach keeps simple operations simple (such as selecting columns and defining filters), with more advanced user interfaces available as you need them (such as recoding columns and defining advanced groupings for your filters). We're confident that new users will find this version easier to learn and become productive with. Experienced users might have to take a few minutes to find their way around, but you'll find all of the features and functions that you're accustomed to, plus a few new ones.

AD: Any news for those of us interested in developing custom tasks (add-in) for EG?
CH: We have extended the add-in APIs for some more advanced features, but probably the best news I can provide is that we will have more documentation for the APIs and SAS-supplied controls, and also several more examples with source code provided. Watch http://support.sas.com/eguide for all of the great new content!

AD: It might be too early to ask this question but are you already working on EG 5.1?
CH: We are already working on the next release, yes. We have some big initiatives underway, including work to take advantage of new features in the forthcoming SAS 9.2 release. Enterprise Guide probably won't be numbered "5.1" -- the marketing folks make the decision on numbering -- we call it whatever they say :)