Your First Look at the Designer Interface

When you are designing reports in SAS Visual Analytics, you see the designer interface.

Here are the features of the designer interface:

The Designer Interface

1	The application bar enables you to return to the SAS Visual Analytics home page and access your recently created or viewed reports. You can also access recently used visual explorations in your recent history. When you select a visual exploration, the application takes you to the explorer interface.
2	The menu bar provides menu items that apply to the entire report or to the currently displayed report section. Actions include creating a new report, adding a new section, inserting new report objects, and adding interactions. You can also log off from SAS Visual Analytics.
3	The toolbar contains icons that enable you to manage your reports. You can click to hide the left and right panes. Or, you can click to display the left and right panes.
4	The Objects and Imports tabs are in the left pane. The Objects tab provides a list of the tables, graphs, and gauges that can be used in a report or dashboard. The Imports tab provides a list of reports and report objects that have been created in the designer interface or exported from the explorer interface. This enables you to create reports from multiple sources and create full-featured reports. You can choose objects or sections in these reports to include in either a new or an existing report.
5	The Data and Shared Rules tabs are in the left pane. The Data tab enables you to select a data source (or data sources) and the data items for your report. You can add, change, or remove a data source using the icons above the list of data items. You can also check the details for the measures in the data set. For more information, see Using Data Items in a Query. The Shared Rules tab enables you to create a new display rule, which is used by a gauge to designate intervals and colors for ranges. You can also edit or delete an existing display rule. These display rules are shared by multiple report objects and can be created at any time.
6	The data item table provides information about a selected data item, including the name, role, format, and aggregation. These data item properties can also be modified, which impacts all of the report objects that use the data item. For more information, see Modifying Data Item Properties.
7	The canvas is the workspace for building a report. Each report section has its own canvas, which can contain a single or multiple report objects. For more information, see Creating a New Report. A report can have multiple sections, which can be accessed by using the tabs at the top of the canvas. For more information, see Maintaining Multi-Section Reports. There is also an area at the top of the canvas where you can drop categories to create section filters.
8	The tabs in the right pane enable you to work with details about the report and report objects. The Properties, Styles, and Display Rules tabs are displayed by default. You can choose to display icons instead of tab names. To display the icons on the tabs, click after the last tab name and select Show icons only. The Properties tab lists the properties for the currently selected report object. The object’s name, title, and description are listed. Information that is specific to the report object type, such as the axes and legend are also included. If a report object is not selected, then the properties are for the section and the report. The Styles tab enables you to specify the data styling, frame styling, text styling, and data colors for a selected report object. The Display Rules tab enables you to populate or add intervals for a gauge that is currently selected in the report canvas. You can also edit or delete an existing display rule for the selected gauge. The Comments tab enables you to add comments to the report after you save it. The Interactions tab enables you to add or update filter or brush interactions to the report objects in a section. For more information, see Creating Interactions. The Roles tab enables you to add or update data role assignments when you have a report object with a data source selected.