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 […]
Tag: Web Report Studio
Selecting multiple individual dates in prompted reports
The date prompt from SAS Prompt Framework provides the options of single selection or a range, however what if you need to select multiple individual dates such as Monday (May 28), Wednesday (May 30), and Friday (June 1) of last week? There are a few a…
Web Report Studio: Adding Drill-Down Filter Based on a Date
When I was creating the Summary and Detailed reports for the SAS Global Forum paper, I was demonstrating how to link from the weekly chart to the detailed report about the week. On my first try with my Week Filter based on the date value – it just would not work. Eeek! To fix the problem I made a new data item that was a character value. This posts talks about my strategy. [You can read our paper “Get Your Fast Pass to Building Business Intelligence with SAS and Google Analytics”. The presentation goes into more detail, but here’s some past articles about Google Analytics. ] What Should Happen When you click on the bar that represents the week – you actually drill-down to the Weekly Detailed report. You cannot use a date value as this filter – you must use a character based filter for this prompt. If you need help setting up the filter or creating the link – just refer to the ”Get Your Fast Pass to Building Business Intelligence with SAS and Google Analytics” paper. Creating the Proper Filter in the Information Map First you need to create a data item based on the date variable. I used a CASE statement to test if the week was […]
SAS OLAP Cubes: Taking Advantage of OLAP Member Properties
Have you ever had a requirement to display additional details about data in a report but couldn’t find a good way to do so? Showing OLAP Member Properties in a SAS Web Report could be a useful way to sneak more details about data into a crosstab table. Crossing Multiple Dimensions with High Cardinality Creates Data Headaches I recently ran into a data challenge with a large OLAP cube (NWAY of about 12 million records) where I needed to summarize a simple count by a “group ID” crossed with a “group name” crossed with another insignificant dimension. There were a large number of “groups” – over a 1000 distinct group IDs with matching group names. Since the cardinality between the “group ID” and “group name” with the source data was pretty high, the OLAP query took a very long time to run and ultimately failed due to a lack of memory. Rather than figuring out how to cross two dimensions with high cardinality (which is not going to be realistic), I used the “group name” to define a member property of the “group ID”. Since the group name had a one-to-one relationship with the group ID, the member property makes sense. […]
Web Report Studio: Adding a Confidentiality Disclaimer
Adding disclaimers to SAS Web Report Studio tables and graphs is sometimes necessary for confidentiality purposes. You can do this easily by using the Configuration Manager available in SAS Management Console 9.2 and up. This is shown to the right. Adding a Table Disclaimer Through SAS Management Console SAS Support provides official documentation for adding disclaimers in SAS 9.3 as well as SAS 9.2. To add the disclaimer, simply find the “Web Report Studio 4.3″ application under the Configuration Manager through SAS Management Console. Right click and go to the “Advanced” tab and add the property as shown below. Downsides The major downside is the disclaimer gets inserted on every single table and chart produced going forward. Web reports can get very cluttered with the same message. As an alternative I would recommend building a Web Report Studio template with the security message as a footer. Report writers can be educated to always use this template to enforce security policies. I noticed a reference to an XHTML fragment in the LocalProperties.xml file for Web Report Studio… Not sure how this works, but if anybody has any ideas please share! Related content: MDX: Dynamically Hiding Measures for Compliance
Peek Inside SAS BI Book: Building Business Intelligence with SAS
You may be aware by now, our new SAS BI book Building Business Intelligence with SAS:Content Development Examples launched last week on the SAS Press site. That’s right, SAS Press or Amazon will be delighted to bring a copy of this SAS BI book to your door. When Angela and I set out to write this book, one of the first things we discussed was how new users get access to the SAS BI toolset and have no idea of its astonishing capabilities. This book guides you through each one so you understand it. Intermediate and advanced users will also find this book as a valuable reference. Several times, Angela & I have both found ourselves pulling out the draft copy to reference an advanced technique. This book fulfills a unique spot in the marketplace; there is no other single book that leads you through each SAS BI component with step-by-step examples along with hundreds of tips and techniques to make you successful! SAS Institute offers over nine SAS BI courses to cover all the topics we have jammed packed into this book. Making this an excellent study guide for those planning to take the SAS BI Content Development Exam. Your SAS […]
SAS Web Report Studio: Chart Makeover – Before and After Shots!
SAS Web Report Studio has some features that help can improve the overall appearance or just shake things up a little. You can change the template for individual reports in cases where you need to better highlight an idea. Tip! Check out the Information is Beautiful site for some inspirational ideas about presenting data. Of course, Stephen Few’s Now Your See It book I keep on my desk as a reference for presenting data. Changing the SAS Web Report Studio Template Colors In the Before shot, the Applied filters text is black, which I think is a little distracting, and the green line disappears slightly into the blue bar. In the After chart, the line is red so there is more contrast between the line and bar. Note: This change will update the template and change the color from green to red everywhere. Make sure that is what you want to do. To change the chart, do this: From the File menu, select Properties. From the Format pane, select the Use customized colors radio button. Select the second color box on the top row, which controls the line color. From the color drop-down box, select a new color. Bonus Ideas […]
SAS BI: Looking at Google Analytics for Popular Blog Topics
This past week I have been studying the Google Analytics data to determine the best topics to discuss in the upcoming month and to prepare the SAS Glo Fo 2012 conference. Google Analytics allows me to measure which posts get the most hits when posted and continue to be popular or referenced. I’ll unveil my little known, but highly coveted analytics process. How’s that for some hype? Getting the Google Analytics Data In a past article, I discussed how I extracted the data from Google Analytics using Excellent Analytics. The following figure shows my query in the Excellent Analytics tool, the data results, and the results in SAS Enterprise Guide. The data consists of the date, post path and title (with URL), source (how person came to site), and visitor type. It’s probably obvious why I would want the date, post, and source but what is not so obvious is visitor type. Visitor Type allows me analyze what topics bring new visitors to the site as well as the topics that retain visitors. Cleaning Up the Data My original plan was to use MS Excel to complete this analysis since I thought it would be simple. However, I realized that […]