Sunday, August 16, 2009

Benefits to Using the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office

Most of the SAS add-in functionality is identical in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint; for example, you can run analyses and reports in all three applications.
The SAS add-in extends the functionality in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint by enabling you to complete the following tasks:
§ Access SAS data sources as the input data for your analysis. You can view any SAS data source or any data source available from your SAS server (including databases such as Oracle, Teradata, and DB2).
§ Perform more sophisticated analysis and computations than what is available in Microsoft Excel. For example, one of the sophisticated analyses that SAS provides is the Canonical Correlation task. This task enables you to examine the relationship between a linear combination of a set of X variables and a linear combination of a set of Y variables. You might run a canonical correlation analysis to determine the degree of correspondence between a set of job characteristics and a set of measures of employee satisfaction. This extends the correlation analysis that is available in Excel. You can run these sophisticated analyses and computations in Excel, Word, or PowerPoint.
§ Run custom analyses that were developed by others at your company. Using the SAS add-in, you can also access programs, which are called SAS Stored Processes. These programs are customized SAS code that is developed by business analysts or your IT department. Running these programs enables you to quickly generate a custom report without writing any SAS code.
§ Refresh the content in the Excel worksheet, Word document, or PowerPoint presentation on demand or automatically at a specified time. Scheduling when the content is refreshed enables you to have the most up-to-date data and reports when you need it.
§ Publish the results to a central location. By publishing a document, you can share it with others without having to e-mail it. If you publish the document to a metadata repository, then you can perform an impact analysis on the document. Impact analysis enables you to see where a data source came from and the items that are dependent on this source. This analysis enables you to know how changing a data source might affect other documents.
Additional functionality is available in Excel. In Microsoft Excel, you can also complete the following tasks:
§ Access and view data sources that exceed the 65,536 record limitation in Excel. The SAS add-in does its processing on the server, which enables it to by-pass the record limitation in Excel.
§ Copy data to a SAS server. You can copy an Excel data source or a SAS data source to the SAS server. After a data source is copied to a SAS server, it becomes a SAS data set. This enables you to share Excel data with Word and PowerPoint users at your site. This functionality also enables Excel users to update information in a SAS data source and upload it to the SAS server.
§ Send the results from an analysis that you ran in Excel to a Word document or PowerPoint presentation. For example, you ran analysis of your company’s sales for this year, and now you need to give a presentation of the results. Using this functionality in Excel, you can select which results to include in a PowerPoint presentation. This saves you time because you only need to run the analysis once.
This book explores some of the basic tasks that you can perform in Excel.

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