Our Instructor Tip videos have received positive feedback and often generate follow-up conversations between our instructors and our users. For example, just this week, one of our instructors, David Ghan, responded to a question that he received from a SAS user about this video: SAS Enterprise Guide Tip: Exporting Results and Preserving Historical Versions.

Q. Can the process have been done for just one file instead of the 2 files? Both files were run at the same time, but I'm assuming that it is possible to run them independently.

A. Yes. You could simply run each Export Step on its own after you create the export step. In this case, though, that would not really work well because you need to run the Customer Summary Tables task to update the results. So, in this scenario, you would create 2 versions of the Summary Tables task. One of the copies of the Customer Summary Tables task would only generate the PDF report and the other copy would only generate the Excel workbook. Then you would set up the Export process for each.

As you can see in the above image, you now have two separate branches in the Enterprise Guide project for each type of output. You can right-click the Summary Tables task that generates the PDF report and select “Run branch from Customer Summary Table” (or, more generally, “Run branch from ”). Likewise you can right-click the other Summary Tables task that generates the Excel workbook and select “Run branch from …”. This will run only the project items for the specific branch.

If you haven't already, check out all of our video tips on our Web site or our YouTube Playlist. Feel free to submit your questions or feedback so that we can feature it on our blog to share with others.