Creating sophisticated, visually stunning reports is imperative in today s business environment, but is your fancy report really accessible to all? Let s explore some simple enhancements that the fourth maintenance release of SAS^® 9.4 made to Output Delivery System (ODS) layout and the Report Writing Interface that will truly empower you to accommodate people who use assistive technology. ODS now provides the tools for you to meet Section 508 compliance and to create an engaging experience for all who consume your reports.

Visualization is a critical part to turn data into knowledge. A customized graph is essential to make data visualization meaningful, powerful, and interpretable. Furthermore, customizing grouped data into a desired layout with specific requirements such as clusters, colors, symbols, and patterns for each group can be challenging. This paper provides a start-from-scratch, step-by-step solution to create a customized graph for grouped data using the Graph Template Language (GTL). From analyzing the data to creating the target graph with the tools and options that are available with GTL, this paper demonstrates GTL is a powerful and flexible tool for creating a customized, complex graph.

The SAS^® 9.4 SGPLOT procedure is a great tool for creating all types of graphs, from business graphs to complex clinical graphs. The goal for such graphs is to convey the data in a simple and direct manner with minimal distractions. But often, you need to grab the attention of a reader in the midst of a sea of data and graphs. For such cases, you need a visual that can stand out above the rest of the noise. Such visuals insert a decorative flavor into the graph to attract the eye of the reader and to encourage them to spend more time studying the visual. This presentation discusses how you can create such attention-grabbing visuals using the SGPLOT procedure.

Creating an effective style for your graphics can make the difference between clearly conveying your message to your audience and hiding your message in a sea of lines, markers, and text. A number of books explain the concepts of effective graphics, but you need an understanding of how styles work in your environment to correctly apply those principles. The goal of this paper is to give you an in-depth discussion of how styles are applied to Output Delivery System (ODS) graphics, from the ODS style level all the way down to the graph syntax. This discussion includes information about differences in grouped versus non-grouped plots, precedence order of style application, using style references, and much more. Don't forget your scuba gear!

Some data is best visualized in a polar orientation, particularly when the data is directional or cyclical. Although the SG procedures and Graph Template Language (GTL) do not directly support polar coordinates, they are quite capable of drawing such graphs with a little bit of data processing. We demonstrate how to convert your data from polar coordinates to Cartesian coordinates and use the power of SG procedures to create graphs that retain the polar nature of your data. Stop going around in circles: let us show you the way out with SG procedures!

When you look at examples of the REPORT procedure, you see code that tests _BREAK_ and _RBREAK_, but you wonder what s the breakdown of the COMPUTE block? And, sometimes, you need more than one break line on a report, or you need a customized or adjusted number at the break. Everything in PROC REPORT that is advanced seems to involve a COMPUTE block. This paper provides examples of advanced PROC REPORT output that uses _BREAK_ and _RBREAK_ to customize the extra break lines that you can request with PROC REPORT. Examples include how to get custom percentages with PROC REPORT, how to get multiple break lines at the bottom of the report, how to customize break lines, and how to customize LINE statement output. This presentation is aimed at the intermediate to advanced report writer who knows some about PROC REPORT, but wants to get the breakdown of how to do more with PROC REPORT and the COMPUTE block.

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Would you like to be more confident in producing graphs and figures? Do you understand the differences between the OVERLAY, GRIDDED, LATTICE, DATAPANEL, and DATALATTICE layouts? Finally, would you like to learn the fundamental Graph Template Language methods in a relaxed environment that fosters questions? Great this topic is for you! In this hands-on workshop, you are guided through the fundamental aspects of the GTL procedure, and you can try fun and challenging SAS^® graphics exercises to enable you to more easily retain what you have learned.

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Do you need to add annotations to your graphs? Do you need to specify your own colors on the graph? Would you like to add Unicode characters to your graph, or would you like to create templates that can also be used by non-programmers to produce the required figures? Great, then this topic is for you! In this hands-on workshop, you are guided through the more advanced features of the GTL procedure. There are also fun and challenging SAS^® graphics exercises to enable you to more easily retain what you have learned.

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Heat maps use colors to communicate numeric data by varying the underlying values that represent red, green, and blue (RGB) as a linear function of the data. You can use heat maps to display spatial data, plot big data sets, and enhance tables. You can use colors on the spectrum from blue to red to show population density in a US map. In fields such as epidemiology and sociology, colors and maps are used to show spatial data, such as how rates of disease or crime vary with location. With big data sets, patterns that you would hope to see in scatter plots are hidden in dense clouds of points. In contrast, patterns in heat maps are clear, because colors are used to display the frequency of observations in each cell of the graph. Heat maps also make tables easier to interpret. For example, when displaying a correlation matrix, you can vary the background color from white to red to correspond to the absolute correlation range from 0 to 1. You can shade the cell behind a value, or you can replace the table with a shaded grid. This paper shows you how to make a variety of heat maps by using PROC SGPLOT, the Graph Template Language, and SG annotation.

The days of comparing paper copies of graphs on light boxes are long gone, but the problems associated with validating graphical reports still remain. Many recent graphs created using SAS/GRAPH^® software include annotations, which complicate an already complex problem. In ODS Graphics, only a single input data set should be used. Because annotation can be more easily added by overlaying an additional graph layer, it is now more practical to use that single input data set for validation, which removes all of the scaling, platform, and font issues that got in the way before. This paper guides you through the techniques to simplify validation while you are creating your perfect graph.

Microsoft Excel worksheets enable you to explore data that answers the difficult questions that you face daily in your work. When you combine the SAS^® Output Deliver System (ODS) with the capabilities of Excel, you have a powerful toolset that you can use to manipulate data in various ways, including highlighting data, using formulas to answer questions, and adding a pivot table or graph. In addition, ODS and Excel give you many methods for enhancing the appearance of your tables and graphs. This paper, written for the beginning analyst to the most advanced programmer, illustrates first how to manipulate styles and presentation elements in your worksheets by controlling text wrapping, highlighting and exploring data, and specifying Excel templates for data. Then, the paper explains how to use the TableEditor tagset and other tools to build and manipulate both basic and complex pivot tables that can help you answer all of the questions about your data. You will also learn techniques for sorting, filtering, and summarizing pivot-table data. ^®

Graphics are an excellent way to display results from multiple statistical analyses and get a visual message across to the correct audience. Scientific journals often have very precise requirements for graphs that are submitted with manuscripts. While authors often find themselves using tools other than SAS^® to create these graphs, the combination of the SGPLOT procedure and the Output Delivery System enables authors to create what they need in the same place as they conducted their analysis. This presentation focuses on two methods for creating a publication quality graphic in SAS^® 9.4 and provides solutions for some issues encountered when doing so.

A new ODS destination for creating Microsoft Excel workbooks is available starting in the third maintenance release for SAS^® 9.4. This destination creates native Microsoft Excel XLSX files, supports graphic images, and offers other advantages over the older ExcelXP tagset. In this presentation, you learn step-by-step techniques for quickly and easily creating attractive multi-sheet Excel workbooks that contain your SAS^® output. The techniques can be used regardless of the platform on which SAS software is installed. You can even use them on a mainframe! Creating and delivering your workbooks on demand and in real time using SAS server technology is discussed. Using earlier versions of SAS to create multi-sheet workbooks is also discussed. Although the title is similar to previous presentations by this author, this presentation contains new and revised material not previously presented.

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If you've got an iPhone, you might have noticed that the Health app is hard at work collecting data on every step you take. And, of course, the data scientist inside you is itching to analyze that data with SAS^®. This paper and an accompanying E-Poster show you how to get step data out of your iPhone Health app and into SAS. Once it's there, you can have at it with all things SAS. In this presentation, we show you how a (what else?) step plot can be used to visualize the 73,000+ steps the author took at SAS^® Global Forum 2016.

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With the proliferation of analytics expanding across every function of the enterprise, the need for broader access to data by experienced data scientists and non-technical users to produce reports and do discovery is growing exponentially. The unintended consequence of this trend is a bottleneck within IT to deliver the necessary data while still maintaining the necessary governance and data security standards required to safeguard this critical corporate asset. This presentation illustrates how organizations are solving this challenge and enabling users to both access larger quantities of existing data and add new data to their own models without negatively impacting the quality, security, or cost to store that data. It also highlights some of the cost and performance benefits achieved by enabling self-service data management.

Did you know that you could leverage the statistical power of the FREQ procedure and still be able to control the appearance of your output? Many people think they have to use procedures such as REPORT and TABULATE to be able to apply style options and control formats and headings for their output. However, if you pair PROC FREQ with a TEMPLATE procedure step, you can customize the appearance of your output and make enhancements to tables, such as adding colors and controlling headings. If you are a statistician, you know the many PROC FREQ options that produce high-level statistics. But did you also know that PROC FREQ can generate a graphical representation of those statistics? PROC FREQ can generate the graphs, and then you can use ODS Graphics and the Graph Template Language (GTL) to improve the appearance of the graphs. Written for intermediate users, this paper demonstrates how you can enhance the default output for PROC FREQ one-way and multi-way tables by modifying colors, formats, and labels. This paper also describes the syntax for creating graphs for multiple statistics, and it uses examples to show how you can customize these graphs.

SAS^® Macro Language can be used to enhance many report-generating processes. This presentation showcases the potential that macros have in populating predesigned RTF templates. If you have multiple report templates saved, SAS^® can choose and populate the correct ones based on macro programming and DATA _NULL_ using the TRANSTRN function. The autocall macro %TRIM, combined with a macro (for example, &TEMPLATE), can be attached to the output RTF template name. You can design and save as many templates as you like or need. When SAS assigns the macro variable TEMPLATE a value, the %TRIM(&TEMPLATE) statement in the output pathway correctly populates the appropriate template. This can make life easy if you create multiple different reports based on one data set. All that's required are stored templates on accessible pathways.

Does your job require you to create reports in Microsoft Excel on a quarterly, monthly, or even weekly basis? Are you creating all or part of these reports by hand, referencing another sheet containing rows and rows and rows of data? If so, stop! There is a better way! The new ODS destination for Excel enables you to create native Excel files directly from SAS^®. Now you can include just the data you need, create great-looking tabular output, and do it all in a fraction of the time! This paper shows you how to use the REPORT procedure to create polished tables that contain formulas, colored cells, and other customized formatting. Also presented in the paper are the destination options used to create various workbook structures, such as multiple tables per worksheet. Using these techniques to automate the creation of your Excel reports will save you hours of time and frustration, enabling you to pursue other endeavors.

Do you have a complex report involving multiple tables, text items, and graphics that could best be displayed in a multi-tabbed spreadsheet format? The Output Delivery System (ODS) destination for Excel, introduced in SAS^® 9.4, enables you to create Microsoft Excel workbooks that easily integrate graphics, text, and tables, including column labels, filters, and formatted data values. In this paper, we examine the syntax used to generate a multi-tabbed Excel report that incorporates output from the REPORT, PRINT, SGPLOT, and SGPANEL procedures.

The ODS EXCEL destination has made sharing SAS^® reports and graphs much easier. What is even more exciting is that this destination is available for use regardless of the platform. This is extremely useful when reporting is performed on remote servers. This presentation goes through the basics of using the ODS EXCEL destination and shows specific examples of how to use this in a remote environment. Examples for both SAS^® on Windows and in SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® are provided.

Students now have access to a SAS^® learning tool called SAS^® University Edition. This online tool is freely available to all, for non-commercial use. This means it is basically a free version of SAS that can be used to teach yourself or someone else how to use SAS. Since a large part of my body of writings has focused upon moving data between SAS and Microsoft Excel, I thought I would take some time to highlight the tasks that permit movement of data between SAS and Excel using SAS University Edition. This paper is directed toward sending graphs to Excel using the new ODS EXCEL destination.