Are you a SAS programmer who does not yet use SAS Enterprise Guide? If so, what are you missing?

That's the topic of my SAS Presents paper at SAS Global Forum: Find Out What You're Missing: Programming with SAS Enterprise Guide. From the introduction:

More and more SAS programmers are adopting SAS Enterprise Guide as their programming environment. Many are "willing converts" because they see the productivity benefits. Others are reluctant, but are forced down this path because their organization has centralized SAS on a server, and SAS Enterprise Guide is their new gateway to SAS. Whatever your motivation, there are many techniques and features that can help you to get the most out of your new SAS environment.

Features such as what, you might ask? Such as the new feature that decides automatically whether to run a portion of your project based on conditions that you specify. Here is one section of the presentation:

TO RUN OR NOT TO RUN: APPLY CONDITIONS TO YOUR TASKS
SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2 provides a new way to control how your project is run. Every runnable object in the project (for example, SAS programs, tasks, and queries) can examine one or more conditions before they are actually run. By defining these conditions, you can implement an if-then-else processing structure within your projects.

Here is an example process flow with some conditions applied:

In this example, the decision as to which branch to run depends on the response to a project prompt. If you select Yes when the process runs, SAS Enterprise Guide will run the top Yes branch. Otherwise, the bottom No branch is run instead. The checkmark and X icons that you see at the decision points indicate which path was followed. The checkmark indicates that the connected path was run (the condition was met), and the X indicates that the path was not run (condition was not met).

In addition to project prompt values, you can design conditions that are based on date or time values or on values that are read from a SAS data set. You can also combine conditions to create sophisticated decision points within your project. For example, you can design parts of your process flow that run only once a week on a specific day, or only when a certain data value falls out of a specified range.

The complete paper will be posted to the SAS support site after the conference. If you are attending the conference and want to see this and other features in action, be sure to rouse yourself out of bed at 8 a.m. on Wednesday and come see the presentation.