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
perform these tasks:
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Access SAS data sources as the input data for your analysis.
You can use any SAS data source or any data source that is available
from your SAS server (including databases such as Oracle, Teradata,
and DB2) as the input data for an analysis.
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Perform more complex analyses
and computations than what is available in Microsoft Excel. For example,
one of the complex 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 SAS task extends
the correlation analysis that is available in Excel. You can run these
complex analyses and computations in Excel, Word, or PowerPoint.
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Run custom analyses
that were developed by other users at your company. Using the SAS
add-in, you can also open reports that were developed by SAS Enterprise
Guide, SAS Web Report Studio, or SAS Visual Analytic users at your
site. Some of these reports might run programs 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.
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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 them.
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Send the SAS content to another Microsoft Office application.
For example, you ran an analysis of your company's sales for this
year, and now you need to present the results. Using this functionality
in Excel, you can select which results to include in a PowerPoint
presentation. This saves you time because you run the analysis only
once.
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Save the
results to a central repository. When you save a document to a central
repository, you can share this information with other users without
e-mailing it. If you save the document to a metadata repository (such
as SAS Folders), you can also perform an impact analysis on the document.
Impact analysis enables you to know the location of the data source
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 these
tasks:
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Use the Quick Start tools to automatically
calculate basic statistics and charts that best fit your input data
source.
From the Quick Start
home page, you can access the following functionality:
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the Task Gallery, which lists all
the SAS tasks that are available in the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office.
From the Task Gallery, you can search for a specific task, and then
select the task that you want to run. For each task, an image shows
a sample of the results that are generated by that task.
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the
Automatic Charts panel
where the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office creates bar charts, bubble
plots, line plots, pie charts, or scatter plots based on how you assign
variables to the Categories and Measures roles.
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the
Quick Stats panel
where the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office can quickly calculate the
basic statistics and create basic graphs based on your input data
source. The input data could be an entire SAS data source, a sample
of a SAS data source, or an individual column in the SAS data source.
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Access
and view data sources that exceed the record limitation in Microsoft
Excel. The SAS add-in does its processing on the server, which enables
the SAS add-in to bypass the record limitation in Excel.
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Copy
data to a SAS server. You can copy an Excel data source or a SAS data
source to a SAS server. After a data source is copied to a SAS server,
the data source 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 the updated data source to the SAS server.
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Edit
any data source that is accessible from a SAS server. You open the
data set in Edit mode in Excel. When the data set is in Edit mode,
the data set is locked and cannot be opened by other users at your
site. After you edit the data, you commit your changes to the SAS
server and update the existing data set.
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Use the OLAP Analyzer to view data that
is stored in an OLAP (online analytical processing) cube. In Microsoft
Excel, you can use the OLAP Analyzer to create table and graph views
of your data. You can also drill down through the data, create bookmarks,
add calculated measures and calculated members, filter the OLAP data,
and view ESRI maps.
This documentation explores
some of the basic tasks that you can perform in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.