When the SAS BI Administrator adds a new user to the SAS BI system, a personal folder called “My Folder” is created for the user. Each user can create sub folders and store BI content (such as reports, stored processes, and so on). Use…
Tag: Building Business Intelligence
Create Your Own Sample Data for SAS BI
In a previous post I suggested some places to find sample data that you could import into the SAS BI for use in various learning projects. I found the Identity Generator site that allows you to create and download test data. Plus it’s my favorite price, free! This is a low tech approach but for what I am usually doing, it would work great. There are several site features that I really liked. Output as many rows as you like to several different file types (XLS, CSV, and even emulate Oracle tables) Load tables that others have created. As with anything free, some are better than others. Fields are only limited by your imagination. Suggest names when you are creating a custom field (shown in the example). After creating your data, just press the green Generate button and ta-dah! For the company name data generated in the example, my idea is to pull the data into SAS Enterprise Guide and then concatenate the three company name fields to have a somewhat wacky list of company names (Askvig Redla Limited, Clarke Wynn Calition, and Elvin Shinobu Conglomerate). Generate Company Names Generate a Sample Customer List There was an […]
What *is* a code review?
Our team planned to use a new set of data tables to increase our customer knowledge and overall improve our processes. Due to our workloads, our team lead had a person (Dev X) from another team write some code to access the tables and create some usable datasets for our process. After the code was written, Dev X was asked to arrange a meeting to review the programs. In short, it did not go well. It was not anything Dev X did, it was what did not happen that contributed to the issue. So what went wrong and what can you learn? Mistake #1: Presuming data knowledge What Happened Dev X asked first what our SAS skill level was – the team lead answered “Advanced – macro writers“. Dev X then walked us through the code explaining how SQL joins worked, purpose of LET statements, and how various SAS functions worked, etc. Frankly – it was insulting and a time waster. What Should Have Happened It was good to ask our skill level. If Dev X had been misled in the past, a few questions to qualify “Advanced” would have been good. “Do you use SQL to join, are you […]
Info Map: Get me a new Data Item, puhhleeze!
When creating a new data item, you might want to combine two or more data fields to make one. For instance, you want to create the data item Full Name from First Name and Last Name data items. Using the SAS CAT functions makes this is an easy task. There are three CAT functions available from the Expression Editor. Each of these functions has a slight difference that is useful in various situations. For this example, you will learn how to use the CATX functions to create the Full name data item in three different ways: Employee Name is the First Name and Last Name Employee is the Last Name, First Name Employee Code uses the Employee Number and Last Name The CATX function does 3 things: Concatenates two or more data items Removes the white space at end of the character value Allows you to set a delimiter (comma, space, and so on) between the data items Create Employee Name For this data item, you want a space between the first name and last name. When adding the code place a space between the quote marks. Create Employee For this data item, you want a comma between the last and […]
SAS Portal: Url’s all the space?
If you want a portal page to show an website or web page from another location (URL), use the URL portlet. You have a few options when you use an URL Portlet.
Once you have the portlet created – click the Edit button to specify the website (URL…
Prompts: How do I use a Date Range Prompt?
After some not-so careful consideration, I decided to take the SAS BI Content Developer exam. Some folks I know who have passed the exam recommended that I study how to work with prompts and stored processes. So I am making up examples and working through some exercise drills of my own creation (oooh … scary). I am noticing some of the features and nuisances of working with the Date Range prompts. When I started using stored processes several years ago, it was not quiet this easy to setup date prompts, so the prompts are a welcome improvement. In this example, a Proc Tabulate summarizes the sales by location and date. The Date Range prompt allows the user to select a custom date range between Jan 1995 and December 1998. This figure shows how the prompt looks and the results. Check if the User is Insane … I like this prompt because it does have some built in “sanity” checks. For instance, I tried to make the end date before the start date and it didn’t like it. You can see it generated an error message. This capture is a little dramatic with a date of June 1900. If using Jan 1996 […]
SAS MS Add-In: Why are there two variables with almost same name?
Recently while setting up a report in SAS Add-In for MS Excel, I was going to create a graph using an information map. When trying to assign the chart values, I realized I had several very confusing variable names. When the information map was created, I know I had everything neat looking due to my own OCD about variable names. As shown in the following figure, the red boxes with the (1) – you can see the names are confusing. Turns out Name_2 and Order Month_2 were variables I had copied to create new variables. After changing the options to (2) Show Labels – my wonderful (3) variables names were there. This turned out to be an important change, the Name_2 was actually the Customer name “decoded” and the variable called customer was a custom format I had applied to the customer variable. In the second list, you’ll notice that Customer (after the Sales measure) turned into Group. Making it Permanent You may want to advise your users to update their Options so the labels are always used. From the SAS ribbon, select Tools > Options. In the Data tab, select Display labels instead of variable names from the Settings […]
Stored Process: Need to filter based on a prompt?
For this example – I am creating a report where I want the user to only have the certain values available. If the user selects Mexico as the country then I only want states within Mexico to be available. This pictures shows you how I have the…