Tag: BI Dashboard

Defining a custom color palette for BI Dashboard bar charts

Out of the box, the simple bar graph uses the same color for each bar. A frequent request from users is to define a standard color palette for the dashboard indicators so distinct bars are the same color in each indicator or from refresh to refresh. Wi…

Testing recommendations for SAS BI Dashboard & SAS Web Report Studio

With limited time and budget, you can still thoroughly test SAS reports built in SAS BI Dashboard and SAS Web Report Studio by considering how all the tools were used to build the end report. An understanding of the functionality within each part of th…

Quick HTML Guide for SAS Programmers

The SAS BI web clients each have their own link (or URL).  When working across many customer sites or even just using my own demo sites –  there can be a lot of links to track (BI Dashboard, Portal, WRS, etc). Certainly I can add bookmarks to my browser –  but when moving to different systems I found it’s easier to just have a little .HTML file that I can edit as needed. Set Your BI Toolset Quick Ref Bookmark If you are not sure what I’m trying to describe –  the following page shows an example. It’s really just a simple web page that has the links to the SAS BI Web Clients listed.  In this example –  the customer had two different servers –   Development and Production. Using this quick reference, I can edit the HTML file to match the system I’m using, open the page in the browser, click on the link and it starts the client I want. To make this web page easier to access – I set it as a default so it appears when I start Internet Explorer.  You can set your default home page in the Tools > Internet Options window.  [Other browsers have […]

SAS BI Dashboard: User Adoption Is Biggest Challegne

Today I’m blogging at the All Analytics site about how you encourage users to adopt your dashboard (or really any reporting tools).   Join the Dashboard E-Chat Tomorrow When I was at the IFSUG conference, I attended a presentation by Stephen Harris, a senior VP at Bank of America. He discussed very thoroughly the issues he had getting users to accept the BI Dashboard as a reporting tool and the methodology he later developed to overcome the issues.   There’s an E-Chat with him tomorrow at 3 PM EST where he will be discussing some of the issues and providing advise.  It’s a great chance for you to “speak” directly with an industry expert. If you cannot attend the e-chat – just leave a question here (quick site registration required) and then you can check back afterwards for his answer.  Facebook and Privacy Plus … check out my All Analytics vblog about the data Facebook shares with other sites when you use the quick log-in features. Please join the conversation – I would love to know what you think.  Now I have to go get ready for my red carpet interviews … <ha ha>! Related content: SAS® Global Forum: Is Google […]

What Can I Do With a Stored Process?

Often I refer to SAS Stored Processes as the workhorse of the SAS BI tools … you can use these little devils everywhere sometimes as Band-Aid, sometimes as the star, and sometimes as a background player. In a past post, I showed you how to use a stored process to add dashboard dials to Web Report Studio and Linking to a Stored Process from Web Report Studio. Add-In for MS Office – View Reports or Data Use the stored process to deliver a report or maybe just a dataset (using Proc Print) to the Add-In for Microsoft Office (AMO). In the past, I set up several stored processes that only contained a PROC PRINT to display a data set. Then I added a prompt for Product, which allowed the user to query product inquiries based on the product of interest. Here’s how you access the stored process from AMO 4.3. This works similarly in prior versions of AMO. Open MS Excel (or Word/PowerPoint). On the SAS ribbon, click the Reports icon. Navigate to the stored processes storage location and click the stored process name. < Optional> This stored process has two prompts: Visitor Type and ODS Style. Your stored process […]

SAS BI Dashboard: Measuring the Conversion Rate with Google Analytics

Once you start looking at your Google Analytics, it is thrilling to see that visitors are coming to your humble Web site and some even return. Your first inclination is to create fancy charts to show the traffic patterns, compare the patterns by day of week, segment into New and Returning visitors, soon your charts may even be trending on #StuffDataGeeksDo.   In the past few weeks I have been leaning on you to adding more VA-Voom!!! (in the words of Dr. Suess) to your data using the SAS BI Dashboard. [More Google Analytics and SAS BI Dashboard articles] Why Have a Website? When I started this blog, the main purpose was to ensure SAS BI users were aware of my book, see my writing style, and determine if I knew enough to have written a reliable book. To this end, I had to measure was how many people followed the More Book Info link I had prepared. As a introverted data geek, this was a hard for me because I did not want to be the in-your-face, buy-this-now pushy sales lady! What I wanted was for SAS BI users to know that Angela and I had created an awesome resource that […]

SAS BI Dashboard Rocks My Google Analytics Data Analysis

I have to say I’m in love with the new SAS BI Dashboard and it’s many features. It really brings the Google Analytics to life and helps me understand how the Website traffic changed over time along with the key influences. The following figure gives you an idea of how you can integrate dashboard indicators for an interactive user experience. The best part is how easy it is.  Once I understood the how the feature worked, this indicators below took less than an hour to setup and most of that was deciding what data I wanted to see.   [More articles about Google Analytics here.] Quick Dashboard Tour This dashboard has two indicators, a line graph that shows the traffic over time and a spark table that contains specific data about site visitors. As the user drags the slider and clicks, the data in spark table updates.  I left the Week variable in the Spark Chart to help you understand what was happening. Also in the Last Wk Delta,  New Visitors (%) and New Visitor Delta columns, you can see the various gauges available.     Creating an Interactive Dashboard For several weeks I’ve been discussing using Google Analytics with the SAS […]