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Always learning something new, two awesome Enterprise Guide tricks

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By Topics | Data Visualization Programming Tips

Who says anyone is an expert at something? I definitely do not when it comes to SAS (well, anything for that matter). Each time I sit through a presentation at a conference I learn something new. During the SAS Western Users Conference, fondly know as WUSS, this month I learned two new and awesome tricks for using SAS Enterprise Guide.

Trick #1 - Jump through the log

Ok, ok, I should have known about this already given that my co-author Tricia Aanderud posted about this trick in April. But as most of you know, it is difficult to keep up with everything out there.
Note in the below example I have 13 pages of logs that I would need to jump through to see the first issue. All WARNINGS and ERRORS are accessed via the up/down arrow.

Trick #2 - Create additional process flows to organize your work

When organizing projects, multiple process flows allow you to select areas of the project to run or schedule. I've had some awfully large SAS Enterprise Guide projects in my past. Using this trick would have saved me manual time selecting individual items that I wanted to run in sequence.

Select File New Process Flow to create additional process flows
In the example below, I have 3 process flows ('Initial Review', 'Analysis', and 'Report').
Multiple process flows allow you to run select areas of project

If you don't think you can learn something new, I challenge you to attend a regional SAS User Group conference this fall. Bet you will discover some new awesome idea or trick to implement back at your workplace!

Tags business intelligence enterprise guide
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About Author

Angela Hall

Senior Technical Architect

Angela offers tips on using the SAS Business Intelligence solutions. She manages a team of SAS Fraud Framework implementers within the SAS Solutions On-Demand organization. Angela also has co-written two books, 'Building BI using SAS, Content Development Examples' & 'The 50 Keys to Learning SAS Stored Processes'.

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9 Comments

    • Angela Hall
      Angela Hall on

      Move to the Process Flow window, right click on the program node & click View Results. Also modify your properties in Tools -> Options to display the results by default.

  2. Ramesh on

    Dear SAS Experts,

    When i am running mentioned below sample sas program in SAS EG 6.1 (9,4) I am not getting the SAS HTML or SAS Report.

    Proc print data=sashelp.class;
    run;

    Any help or suggestion ?

    Thanks,
    Ramesh

    • Angela Hall
      Angela Hall on

      Check the settings for Results within Tools -> Options. Did something get turned off by accident?

  4. Jim Brown on

    Dear Angela

    These are just cosmetic stuff. There are many stupid stuff in EG. EG is OK for analyst but not for programmers.

    Regards
    Jim

    • Angela Hall
      Angela Hall on

      Hi Jim!

      Sorry you feel that way about EG. I had a really hard time liking EG at first - after 10 years of programming in BASE SAS I found a lot of the 'features' of EG just got in the way.
      But over the past 5 or so years, I have grown to like EG. The first thing I had to take advantage of was the Options/Preferences. I changed them so that EG 'features' weren't as annoying.

      Here is a paper that I recommend to people hesitant about EG conversion. Top Ten Reasons to Switch to SAS EG, by Heather Seeno.
      Chris Hemedinger also has a great post about the top 5 options to change in EG.

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