SAS Enterprise Guide has about 150 options that you can customize in the Tools->Options window. With each release, the development team adds a few more options that have been asked for by customers, and they rarely decommission any existing options. It's getting quite crowded on some of those options windows!
Alas, the team has not yet discovered how to implement the "Read my mind" option (but believe me, it's been requested), so it remains up to you to investigate the options that are offered and select those that suit the way that you want to work.
I use SAS Enterprise Guide every day to get work done, and I've got some favorite settings that I like to run with that help me to be more productive. Here are my top 5.
Replace results: Replace without prompting
How to find it: Tools->Options->Results->Results General, under the Managing Results heading.
After you set this option, you'll never again see this message "Do you want to replace results? Yes, No, or Cancel" when you re-run a task or program. Your results will always be replaced, which is what most people almost always want.
Turn off Show generated wrapper code in SAS log
How to find it: Tools->Options->Results->Results General...about halfway down the window. This option really helps to declutter your SAS log within SAS Enterprise Guide. I've written about this option in more detail in a previous post.
Show full details when viewing SAS libraries in File Dialog
How to find it: Tools->Options->General...about 1/3 of the way down the page. Checking this option allows you to see more details about the data sets in your libraries before you add them to your project. Read more about the File Details option in an earlier post.
Turn off Show Welcome window at start-up
How to find it: Tools->Options->General...top option. Or, check the box that says "Don't show this window again" the next time you see the "Welcome to SAS Enterprise Guide" window. This tells SAS Enterprise Guide, "Hey, the honeymoon is over. Get out of the way and let's get to work."
The Welcome window does provide handy one-click access to your most recently used projects. But you can also get to those via File->Recent Projects. Bonus added in the 4.3 release: File->Recent Programs, which provides easy access to SAS program files that you've opened recently.
Change default SAS Report style to Plateau
How to find it: Tools->Options->Results->SAS Report, Appearance section.
The default ODS output style for SAS Report is Analysis. It's a nice clean style, but I prefer Plateau because it's a bit more concise and can fit more information on a screen. Here: take a look at this sample to see what I mean. There are lots of different styles: experiment and see which one you like the best.
Change Graph Format to PNG
How to find it: Tools->Options->Results->Graph, Graph Format.
The default graph format for items such as bar chart and line charts is ActiveX. ActiveX has been the default output format in SAS Enterprise Guide since 1999, when the product shipped with version 1.0 on top of SAS Version 8. Back then, the quality of the charts produced using the ActiveX graph control was pretty impressive when compared to the output produced using GIF or similar static chart types.
The ActiveX device tells SAS to generate verbose scripting code as part of the SAS Report or HTML output. Then a client-side control is used to render the graph. This allows for some interactivity in the graph, but it also comes with a limitation: if the graph contains lots of data points, the script gets larger, and that can make for a very large output file.
SAS/Graph has come a long way since the early days of SAS Enterprise Guide, and with SAS 9.2 we like to recommend the PNG device for most applications. The PNG (or GIF or JPEG devices) respect the SAS graph styles and look pretty nice.
If you use ODS Graphics (or the SGPLOT procedure), you get PNG already since ActiveX isn't supported.
Whoops, that's 6 options, not 5! Once I get going it's difficult to stop. I've got some other favorites that I recommend for certain situations (working with databases, making the best of network latency, collaborating with teammates on projects); those will provide good topics for a future post.
What about you? Do you have a favorite set of options for SAS Enterprise Guide, or even SAS in general? Post back in the comments.
16 Comments
Thanks for sharing your tips Chris... I hadn't noticed the "Replace without prompting" setting before so thanks for pointing that one out.
In teaching SAS Enterprise Guide courses for SAS Institute Australia I find that some common settings/options people want to know are:
- Removing the default footnote that appears in results (Tools -> Options -> Tasks -> Tasks General)
- Removing the SAS Procedure title in results (Tools -> Options -> Tasks -> Tasks General - checkbox or in code ODS NOPROCTITLE;
- Turning off the default setting in Enterprise Guide which automatically opens data when added to a project (Tools -> Options -> Data -> Data General)
I just love using the ODS excelxp tagset statement & options at the moment... Using it with the SAS macro language, it is an awesome way to automate the creation of excel spreadsheets - are there any plans for including this as a task in EG for the non-programmers?
Awesome post Chris!
Couple of my 'required' option settings are based on prior expeirence.
A statistics professor from NCSU always preached that we MUST review the logs first before reviewing the output. So I've set the option 'Project Views' -> 'Show SAS Output Log' to on. I also uncheck the box to 'Automatically open data or results when generated' in the 'Results'->'Results General' area. (This second one keeps me from cheating and looking at the results 1st anyway.)
Also, to keep me from sitting at the computer goofing off while waiting for large data sets to open or to receive the 'are you sure you want to open this' message. I unchecked the box for 'Data'->'Data General'->'Automatically open data when added to project'.
Michelle, thanks for sharing! Great tip about changing the default footnote text. Did you know that EG creates some macro vars you might find useful there? Try "Created by &_CLIENTUSERNAME" and see what you get.
I agree that tagsets.ExcelXP is powerful. The EG and SAS Add-In team are working on better integration to show you ExcelXP results, but not too much for controlling what you get without additional programming. The ExcelXP options are tremendous; it's difficult to put a comprehensive user interface around all of that.
Instead, point-and-click users can use SAS Report, and create custom reports with File->New->Report. Then you can "Send To Microsoft Excel" if you have SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office installed.
Angela, that "automatically open data" tick mark is a favorite for folks who don't want to automatically hit a data source just because it was created/modified by a step. There are actually two options: one in the Data section ("Open data when you add it to the project") and one in the Results section ("Automatically open data/results when generated").
Another great entry in your blog, Chris. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. These are awesome tips that I will share with my SAS Enterprise Guide students.
Chris,
"Alas, the team has not yet discovered how to implement the "Read my mind" option..."
I am still looking for an explanation for an old internal option that existed until not long ago.
options $magic;
I can only assume this was one of the earlier attempts at "read my mind"
Of course I was always very afraid of changing the option to "$nomagic" just in case ......
I must add one, absolutely necessary for me, option to the list. My clients all use Word, so they prefer RTF reports. However, the default date that is used is the Word version on today(), so every time the result is opened it displays today's date rather than the date created. The fix is in
tools --> options --> results --> rtf
and add
sasdate
to the box labelled "Additional Options for the ODS RTF statement:"
I find that much more satisfying than using the global NODATE option and relying on the footnote.
Hi Chris, you made reference to this post in reply to my colleague Ben's query on my behalf regarding "Collecting results". Obviously there are a number of preferences that can be selected to limited the time this takes.
However, if "Collecting results" actually means downloading the ODS results from the workspace server into your EG project why does it take some time if the only thing run is a simple datastep? The only thing being collected is the "Output Data", & if the "Automatically open data/results when generated" preference is already deselected then shouldn't the "Output Data" tab not be required at all as there is no ODS component?
Ideally it would be great if "Collecting results" could be suppressed entirely by a preference as well.
Any other thoughts greatly appreciated, Thanks.
Dave,
You might be running into an issue, relatively rare but reported by a few customers, where we see an inexplicable delay in the "collecting results" step. I recommend that you work with SAS Technical Support to collect some diagnostic logs, and perhaps together we can identify a solution.
Chris
I like the look of the Plateau style, but it's not available on SAS EG 4.1. Any suggested substitutes for those of us still using 4.1? Or could I find the Plateau style somewhere and install it myself?
For EG 4.1, try "Seaside" - it's also somewhat compact, I think.
An option that has saved my sanity...putting my column names in alphabetical order.
Tools -> Options -> Data -> Data General
The first checkbox: Display columns in alphabetical order within task windows and the Query Builder.
Hi,
I know all the cool kids are in sunny Florida... But I'm just starting to play with EG, and I'm curious:
Is there a way I can assign a function key to be "Run Selection"? F8 runs the whole program. And I'm getting tired of mousing to run->selection. Thanks for the tip on how to replace without prompting! Good luck with the closing session!
--Q.
Quentin, If you select/highlight lines of code in EG and press F3, it should submit just the selection. I do this quite often, actually, while developing bits of code.
Chris,
Do you know if it's possible to disable the option "send to microsoft.."???
I have a request from my audit team to deny all the options to save data into users desktops...
Thanks
You can control a number of related options for saving/sharing data and results on the local machine, but not all of them. See the how to administer the features with role-based capabilities.
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[...] SAS Enterprise Guide options: my favorite 5 SAS Enterprise Guide offers over 150 options to affect its appearance and behavior. Many business users are afraid to change the default settings, or don't even know which settings are available. This post is my "best practice" guidance for venturing into the options settings. [...]