Your marketing team would like to pull data from its different marketing activities into one report. What happens in Vegas might stay in Vegas, but what happens in your data does not have to stay there, locked in different tools or static spreadsheets. Learn how to easily bring data from Google Analytics, Facebook, and Twitter into SAS^® Visual Analytics to create interactive explorations and reports on this data along with your other data for better overall understanding of your marketing activity.

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A United States Department of Defense agency with over USD 40 billion in sales and revenue, 25 thousand employees, and 5.3 million parts to source, partnered with SAS^® to turn their disparate PC-based analytic environment into a modern SAS^® Grid Computing server-based architecture. This presentation discusses the challenges of under-powered desktops, data sprawl, outdated software, difficult upgrades, and inefficient compute processing and the solution crafted to enable the agency to run as the Fortune 50 company that its balance sheet (and our nation's security) demand. In the modern architecture, rolling upgrades, high availability, centralized data set storage, and improved performance enable improved forecasting getting our troops the supplies they need, when and where they need them.

Microsoft Office has over 1 billion users worldwide, making it one of the most successful pieces of software on the market today. Imagine combining the familiarity and functionality of Microsoft Office with the power of SAS^® to include SAS content in a Microsoft Office document. By using SAS^® Office Analytics, you can create Microsoft Excel worksheets that are not just static reports, but interactive documents. This paper looks at opening, filtering, and editing data in an Excel worksheet. It shows how to create an interactive experience in Excel by leveraging Visual Basic for Applications using SAS data and stored processes. Finally this paper shows how to open SAS^® Visual Analytics reports into Excel, so the interactive benefits of SAS Visual Analytics are combined with the familiar interface of an Excel worksheet. All of these interactions with SAS content are possible without leaving Microsoft Excel.

Packing a carry-on suitcase for air travel and designing a report for mobile devices have a lot in common. Your carry-on suitcase contains indispensable items for your journey, and the contents are limited by tight space. Your reports for mobile devices face similar challenges--data display is governed by tight real estate space and other factors such as users' shorter attention span and information density come into play. How do you overcome these challenges while displaying data effectively for your mobile users? This paper demonstrates how smaller real estate on mobile devices, as well as device orientation in portrait or landscape mode, influences best practices for designing reports. The use of containers, layouts, filters, information windows, and carefully selected objects enable you to design and guide user interaction effectively. Appropriate selection of font styles, font sizes, and colors reduce distraction and enhance quick user comprehension. By incorporating these recommendations into your report design, you can produce reports that display seamlessly on mobile devices and browsers.

In healthcare and other fields, the importance of cell suppression as a means to avoid unintended disclosure or identification of Protected Health Information (PHI) or any other sensitive data has grown as we move toward dynamic query systems and reports. Organizations such as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), and the Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) have outlined best practices to help researchers, analysts, report writers, and others avoid unintended disclosure for privacy reasons and to maintain statistical validity. Cell suppression is a crucial consideration during report design and can be a substantial hurdle in the dissemination of information. Often, the goal is to display as much data as possible without enabling the identification of individuals and while maintaining statistical validity. When designing reports using SAS^® Visual Analytics, achieving suppression can be handled multiple ways. One way is to suppress the data before loading it into the SAS^® LASR™ Analytic Server. This has the drawback that a user cannot take full advantage of the dynamic filtering and aggregation available with SAS Visual Analytics. Another method is to create formulas that govern how SAS Visual Analytics displays cells within a table (crosstab) or bars within a chart. The logic can be complex and can meet a variety of needs. This presentation walks through examples of the latter methodology, namely, the creation of suppression formulas and how to apply them to report objects.

You've heard that SAS^® Output Delivery System (ODS) Graphics provides a powerful and detailed syntax for creating custom graphs, but for whatever reason you still haven't added them to your bag of SAS^® tricks. Let's change that! We will also present a code playground based on Microsoft Office that will enable you to quickly try out a variety of prepared SAS ODS Graphics examples, tweak the code, and see the results--all directly from Microsoft Excel. More experienced users will also find the code playground (which is similar in spirit to Google Code Playground or JSFiddle) useful for compiling SAS ODS Graphics code snippets for themselves and for sharing with colleagues, as well as for creating dashboards hosted by Microsoft Excel or Microsoft PowerPoint that contain precisely sized and placed SAS graphics.

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When you create reports in SAS^® Visual Analytics, you automatically have reports that work on mobile devices. How do you ensure that the reports are easy to use and understand on all of your desktops, tablets, and phones? This paper describes how you can design powerful reports that your users can easily view on all their devices. You also learn how to deliver reports to users effortlessly, ensuring that they always have the latest reports. Examples show you tips and techniques to use that create the best possible reports for all devices. The paper provides sample reports that you can download and interactively view on your own devices. These reports include before and after examples that illustrate why the recommended best practices are important. By using these tips and techniques you learn how to design a report once and have confidence that it can be viewed anywhere.

At a community college, there was a need for college employees to quickly and easily find available classroom time slots for the purposes of course scheduling. The existing method was time-consuming and inefficient, and there were no available IT resources to implement a solution. The Office of Institutional Research, which had already been delivering reports using SAS^® Enterprise BI Server, created a report called Find an Open Room to fill the need. By combining SAS^® programming techniques, a scheduled SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® project, and a SAS^® Web Report Studio report delivered within the SAS^® Information Delivery Portal, a report was created that allowed college users to search for available time slots.

SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® is an extremely valuable tool for programmers, but it should also be leveraged by managers and executives to do data exploration, get information on the fly, and take advantage of the powerful analytics and reporting that SAS^® has to offer. This can all be done without learning to program. This paper gives an overview of how SAS Enterprise Guide can improve the process of turning real-time data into real-time business decisions by managers.

Your organization already uses SAS^® Visual Analytics and you have designed reports for internal use. Now you want to publish a report on your external website. How do you design a report for the general public considering the wide range of education and abilities? This paper defines best practices for designing reports that are universally accessible to the broadest audience. You learn tips and techniques for designing reports that the general public can easily understand and use to gain insight. You also learn how to leverage features that help you comply with your legal obligations regarding users with disabilities. The paper includes recommendations and examples that you can apply to your own reports.

The SAS^® Output Delivery System (ODS) ExcelXP tagset offers users the ability to export a SAS data set, with all of the accompanying functions and calculations, to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. For industries, this is particularly useful because although not everyone is a SAS programmer, they would like to have access to and manipulate data from SAS. The ExcelXP tagset is one of several built-in templates for exporting data in SAS. The tagset gives programmers the ability to export functions and calculations into the cells of an Excel spreadsheet. Several options within the tagset enable the programmer to customize the Excel file. Some of these options enable the programmer to name the worksheet, style each table, embed titles and footnotes, and export multiple data tables to the same Excel worksheet.

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Is uniqueness essential for your reports? SAS^® Visual Analytics provides the ability to customize your reports to make them unique by using the SAS^® Theme Designer. The SAS Theme Designer can be accessed from the SAS^® Visual Analytics Hub to create custom themes to meet your branding needs and to ensure a unified look across your company. The report themes affect the colors, fonts, and other elements that are used in tables and graphs. The paper explores how to access SAS Theme Designer from the SAS Visual Analytics home page, how to create and modify report themes that are used in SAS Visual Analytics, how to create report themes from imported custom themes, and how to import and export custom report themes.

One of the most important factors driving the success of requirements-gathering can be easily overlooked. Your user community needs to have a clear understanding of what is possible: from different ways to represent a hierarchy to how visualizations can drive an analysis to newer, but less common, visualizations that are quickly becoming standard. Discussions about desktop access versus mobile deployment and/or which users might need more advanced statistical reporting can lead to a serious case of option overload. One of the best cures for option overload is to provide your user community with access to template reports they can explore themselves. In this paper, we describe how you can take a single rich data set and build a set of template reports that demonstrate the full functionality of SAS^® Visual Analytics, a suite of the most common, most useful SAS Visual Analytics report structures, from high-level dashboards to statistically deep dynamic visualizations. We show exactly how to build a dozen template reports from a single data source, simultaneously representing options for color schemes, themes, and other choices to consider. Although this template suite approach can apply to any industry, our example data set will be publicly available data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, de-identified data on mortgage loan determinations. Instead of beginning requirements-gathering with a blank slate, your users can begin the conversation with, I would like something like Template #4, greatly reducing the time and effort required to meet their needs.

Mobile devices are an integral part of a business professional's life. These mobile devices are getting increasingly powerful in terms of processor speeds and memory capabilities. Business users can benefit from a more analytical visualization of the data along with their business context. The new SAS^® Mobile BI contains many enhancements that facilitate the use of SAS^® Analytics in the newest version of SAS^® Visual Analytics. This paper demonstrates how to use the new analytical visualization that has been added to SAS Mobile BI from SAS Visual Analytics, for a richer and more insightful experience for business professionals on the go.

This paper describes a Kaiser Permanente Northwest business problem regarding tracking recent inpatient hospital utilization at external hospitals, and how it was solved with the flexibility of SAS^® Enterprise Guide^®. The Inpatient Indicator is an estimate of our regional inpatient hospital utilization as of yesterday. It tells us which of our members are in which hospitals. It measures inpatient admissions, which are health care interactions where a patient is admitted to a hospital for bed occupancy to receive hospital services. The Inpatient Indicator is used to produce data and create metrics and analysis essential to the decision making of Kaiser Permanente executives, care coordinators, patient navigators, utilization management physicians, and operations managers. Accurate, recent hospital inpatient information is vital for decisions regarding patient care, staffing, and member utilization. Due to a business policy change, Kaiser Permanente Northwest lost the ability to track urgent and emergent inpatient admits at external, non-plan hospitals through our referral system, which was our data source for all recent external inpatient admits. Without this information, we did not have complete knowledge of whether a member had an inpatient stay at an external hospital until a claim was received, which could be several weeks after the member was admitted. Other sources were needed to understand our inpatient utilization at external hospitals. A tool was needed with the flexibility to easily combine and compare multiple data sets with different field names, formats, and values representing the same metric. The tool needed to be able to import data from different sources and export data to different destinations. We also needed a tool that would allow this project to be scheduled. We chose to build the model with SAS Enterprise Guide.

SAS^® helps people make better decisions. But what makes a decision better? How can we make sure we are not making worse decisions? There are six tenets to follow to ensure we are making better decisions. Decisions are better when they are: (1) Aligned with your mission; (2) Complete; (3) Faster; (4) Accurate; (5) Accessible; and (6) Recurring, ongoing, or productionalized. By combining all of these aspects of making a decision, you can have confidence that you are making a better decision. The breadth of SAS software is examined to understand how it can be applied toward these tenets. Scorecards are used to ensure that your business stays aligned with goals. Data Management is used to bring together all of the data you have, to provide complete information. SAS^® Visual Analytics offerings are unparalleled in their speed to enable you to make faster decisions. Exhaustive testing verifies accuracy. Modern, easy-to-use user interfaces are adapted for multiple languages and designed for a variety of users to ensure accessibility. And the powerful SAS data flow architecture is built for ongoing support of decisions. Several examples from the SAS^® Solutions OnDemand group are used as case studies in support of these tenets.