Your First Look at the Designer

When you are designing reports in SAS Visual Analytics, you see the designer. In general, data-related tasks are initiated from the leftmost pane, and presentation-related tasks are initiated from the rightmost pane.

Here are the features of the designer:

The Designer

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, stored processes, or visual data builder queries in your recent history. When you select a visual exploration, the application takes you to the explorer. When you select a stored process, the application takes you to SAS Visual Analytics Viewer (the viewer). When you select a visual data builder query, the application takes you to SAS Visual Data Builder (the data builder).
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, adding interactions, and launching the viewer without returning to the home page. 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. You can access the report views by clicking , , or on the menu bar.
4	The Objects, Data, Imports, and Shared Rules tabs are in the left pane. The Objects and Data tabs are displayed by default. You can choose to display icons instead of names on the tabs. To display the icons on the tabs, click after the last tab name, and select Show icons only. From this menu, you can also choose which tabs are displayed. The Objects tab provides a list of the tables, graphs, gauges, and controls that can be used in a report or dashboard. The Data tab enables you to select a data source (or data sources) and the data items for your report. You can add, refresh, or remove a data source using the icons above the list of data items. Using the menu, you can change the data source, define a hierarchy, define a calculated item, define an aggregated measure, and show or hide data items. You can check the details for the measures in the data set. For more information, see Working with Data Items in a Report. The data item table on the Data tab provides information about a selected data item, including the name, role, format, aggregation, and sort options. These data item properties can be modified, which impacts all of the report objects that use the data item. For more information, see Modify Data Item Properties. The Imports tab provides a list of reports and report objects that have been created in the designer or exported from the explorer. This enables you to create reports from multiple data 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. The Shared Rules tab enables you to create a new display rule for a gauge, which is used by other gauges to designate intervals and colors for ranges. You can edit or delete an existing shared display rule. These display rules are shared across multiple gauges and can be created at any time.
5	The canvas is the workspace for building a report. You can modify the canvas using the report view icons on the toolbar. For more information, see Creating a New Report. The appearance of the canvas is affected by the report theme. For more information, see Report Themes. 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 an area at the top of the canvas where you can drop filter controls and then categories to create section prompts.
6	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 on the tabs. To display the icons on the tabs, click after the last tab name, and select Show icons only. From this menu, you can also choose which tabs are displayed. The Properties tab lists the properties for the currently selected report or report object. The report’s title and description are listed. 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 listed. If a report object is not selected on the report canvas, 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. You can specify the report theme for the report. The Display Rules tab enables you to populate, add intervals, or color-mapped values for an object that is currently selected on the report canvas. You can edit or delete an existing display rule for the selected table, graph, gauge, or control. For more information, see Overview of Display Rules. The Comments tab enables you to add comments to the report after you save it. For more information, see Adding Comments to Reports. The Filters tab enables you to add a filter (or filters) to the selected report object. For more information, see About Report Filters. The Interactions tab enables you to add or update filter or brush interactions with the report objects in a section. For more information, see Creating Interactions. The Ranks tab enables you to add rankings to report objects. For example, you might want to see the top 10 products that sold last year. For more information, see Overview of Ranking in Reports. The Roles tab enables you to add or update data role assignments in a selected report object that has a data source. For more information, see Modifying Data Role Assignments in Report Objects.