Benefits to Using the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office

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.

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.

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 Visual Analytics or SAS Enterprise Guide 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.

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.

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.

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.

Use these tools to automatically calculate basic statistics and charts that best fit your input data source.

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.

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.

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.

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.