Appendix 4 Overview of SAS Enterprise Guide

This appendix provides a brief overview of SAS Enterprise Guide.

Purpose and Audience for SAS Enterprise Guide

Some companies have centralized their SAS installation on a server, and they use a client/server environment for individual users. SAS Enterprise Guide is a Microsoft Windows client application designed for this environment. (SAS Enterprise Guide requires a connection to SAS software, either on your local PC or on a remote server.) One of the main purposes of SAS Enterprise Guide is to enable users to use SAS procedures without having to know how to program SAS code.

The audience for SAS Enterprise Guide includes business analysts, programmers, and statisticians.

Summary of Software Structure

SAS Enterprise Guide provides a point-and-click interface to SAS procedures and DATA steps. You can use the Program Editor window in SAS Enterprise Guide if you still want to write your own code. The SAS Enterprise Guide interface includes guides for the procedures in this book. (Availability of specific options might differ depending on release.)

SAS Enterprise Guide uses projects to organize your work. You create a project, which can then contain data sets, programs, output, and graphs. These elements of a project should be familiar to you after working through this book. In addition, you can select an option to turn on a project log file, which is a combined view of all of the log files for all of the activities in the project. SAS automatically updates the project log file any time you perform any activity in the project.

Projects include process flow diagrams that link the elements together. For example, a process flow for a project might show the data set, then the programs for the data set, and then the resulting output, all linked together in an orderly sequence. Some companies use these diagrams as a way to document and validate activity.

Projects can become quite sophisticated. By adding conditions, you can control which activities occur based on a Yes or No decision. You can design conditions to run a given program and create output once a week or only when specific issues occur in the data.

Overview of Key Features

The list below provides a brief summary of key features in SAS Enterprise Guide:

• creates and reads SAS data sets.
• accesses all types of data supported by SAS.
• provides the Query Builder, which guides you through the activities of creating subsets of data, joining data, and more.
• creates descriptive statistics and graphs.
• performs analyses discussed in this book, including t-tests, ANOVA, correlation, contingency table analyses, and nonparametric alternatives. The software provides a wizard with options for each of these analyses.
• performs more advanced analyses, including multivariate models, survival analysis, and forecasting.
• enables you to deliver results in SAS Report, HTML, RTF, PDF, and text formats. Graphs can be saved as GIFs, JPEGs, and in other formats. Because the results are stored on the server, they can easily be shared with other users.
• enables you to automatically upload results on a periodic basis.
• for advanced users, provides the ability to create custom wizards that guide other users through analysis tasks.

This brief appendix can provide only an overview of the software. If your company uses SAS in a client/server environment, you probably need to understand how to use SAS Enterprise Guide.

References

In addition to the SAS documentation on the software, the following references are especially useful when learning how to use SAS Enterprise Guide. At the time this book was published, the paper was available online at support.sas.com. In addition, this Web site is a good general resource for the latest information about features and releases for SAS Enterprise Guide.

Hemedinger, Chris, and Bill Gibson. 2008. “Find Out What You’re Missing: SAS Enterprise Guide for SAS Programmers.” Proceedings of the SAS Global Forum 2008 Conference. Cary, NC: SAS Institute Inc.

Slaughter, Susan J., and Lora D. Delwiche. 2006. The Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.1. Cary, NC: SAS Institute Inc.