Real BI for Real Users

Maintaining prompt selections in multiple Web Report Sections (v4.3)

Angela Hall — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:30:50 +0000

SAS Technical Support has a wonderful how-to guide for using one set of prompt values across multiple sections of a Web Report Studio report. This works great in 4.2, however there is one additional item that I discovered in a 4.3/9.3 install. With the addition of PROC STP and SAS [...]

Cleaner OLAP cube physical folder structures

Angela Hall — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:30:37 +0000

Each spring and fall, I start clearing out the kid's small clothes, old toys, etc. It can sometimes go too far and reach into my "digital pack-rat" issues. (Wait, what does that mean? Well, just ask the person who last week requested detail on a project I worked 3 years [...]

So many autoexecs; three tips for BI administrators

Angela Hall — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:35:43 +0000

BASE SAS users are already familiar with the autoexec file. This is a .sas file that typically resides in the installation folder of the SAS executable. Instructions for setting it up in UNIX, Windows, and other environments is readily available on the SAS website. In SAS BI configurations there are [...]

Verifying a SAS BI installation

Angela Hall — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:25:38 +0000

After installing SAS Business Intelligence, I would also suggest verifying that all is working appropriately before adding users or importing content from another machine. (My template checklist is included below.) The act of creating the content is an extremely important test (to immediately rectify issues with accessing data, or saving [...]

Go on a date with SAS BI Dashboard, part 2

Angela Hall — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:20:21 +0000

Last week I provided the steps for how to go on a date, at least by using dynamic prompts in BI Dashboard. Now that you have seen how to create them, lets discuss making them smarter. For this example, the customer is asking for two prompts to affect a single [...]

Go on a date with SAS BI Dashboard, part 1

Angela Hall — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:15:28 +0000

Don't give up on the dating game. Just because there is no prompt type specifically for dates, it can still be accomplished with some stored process matchmaking. BI Dashboard offers a dynamic prompt indicator which provides the ultimate flexibility in developing prompt based reports and dashboards. The dynamic prompt indicator [...]

Always learning something new, two awesome Enterprise Guide tricks

Angela Hall — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:53:44 +0000

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 [...]

Defining a custom color palette for BI Dashboard bar charts

Angela Hall — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:44:12 +0000

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. With most dashboard tricks, [...]

Testing recommendations for SAS BI Dashboard & SAS Web Report Studio

Angela Hall — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:47:35 +0000

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 the chain from raw data to [...]

Use OLAP data sources from SAS Stored Processes

Angela Hall — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:30:10 +0000

So are you now dreaming big? Coming up with other ideas for how SAS Stored Processes can be leveraged in your installation of SAS? As I mentioned in last week's post, you could use OLAP cubes as a data source for your SAS Stored Process. Here is how I would [...]