Copy an entire process flow in SAS Enterprise Guide

I've seen some crazy process flows in SAS Enterprise Guide. Crazy-big, and crazy-complex, used by real customers to accomplish real work. But while these process flows represent a ton of work, this is usually a calculated investment to automate processes that would be difficult to capture in another way.

For years, SAS Enterprise Guide users have asked for a way to reuse their process flows in new projects. You have always been able to copy-and-paste individual items (tasks, queries, programs) from one project to another, or from one flow to another in the same project. But when you tried to copy a collection of items from a flow, everything fell apart when you pasted into the new destination. The links/relationships among the objects were not retained, and that sabotaged your goal of saving time and effort.

In SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1, this is finally improved. You can now copy an entire flow, or multiple selected items from a flow, and paste that content intact into another project or process flow.

To copy an entire flow, right-click on the flow name within the Project Tree, then select Copy. In your destination project, right-click on an empty spot within the Project Tree and you'll see that Paste is enabled. When you paste, you'll see the entire flow transfer over, including the links and layout. It's like magic.

To copy just a portion of the process flow, click-drag the cursor to "rubberband" a selection of connected items. (You can also use Ctrl+click to select the items that you want to include.) With the items selected, right-click on one of the selected items and choose Copy. You can then Paste the content into a new or existing process flow.

You can paste a process flow into a new or an existing SAS Enterprise Guide project. Try it for yourself -- see how much time it can save for you!

Note: this feature was added in SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1. The first update (7.11) improved it further (such as capturing project prompts that are referenced in your flow).