About SAS Enterprise Guide

For over three decades, SAS software has been used by programmers, analysts, and scientists to manipulate and analyze data. Today, SAS (pronounced sass) is used around the world in 120 countries and at more than 45,000 sites. SAS users stay with SAS year after year because they know its broad flexibility and depth of functionality will enable them to get the work done. However, not everyone wants to write programs.

What SAS Enterprise Guide is SAS Enterprise Guide gives you access to the power of SAS via a point-and-click interface. SAS Enterprise Guide does not itself analyze data. Instead, SAS Enterprise Guide generates SAS programs. Every time you run a task in SAS Enterprise Guide, it writes a SAS program. The List Data task, for example, writes a PROC PRINT. The Summary Tables task writes a PROC TABULATE. There are over 80 such tasks offered within SAS Enterprise Guide. When you click Run in SAS Enterprise Guide, it submits the program to SAS. SAS runs the program, and then sends the results (such as reports, graphs, data tables, and SAS logs) back to SAS Enterprise Guide so that you can see them.

You don't have to be a programmer to use SAS Enterprise Guide, but, if you would like to see the SAS program that SAS Enterprise Guide writes for you, you can do that too. You can also edit the programs written by SAS Enterprise Guide, or open an empty Program window and write a SAS program from scratch using a syntax-sensitive editor similar to the one in Base SAS. Then you can run your SAS program, and view the SAS log and output. So, SAS Enterprise Guide meets the needs of programmers and non-programmers alike.

What software you need To run SAS Enterprise Guide, you need, of course, SAS Enterprise Guide software. SAS Enterprise Guide runs in only the Windows operating environment. Because SAS Enterprise Guide writes programs and submits them to SAS, you also need a machine on which Base SAS is installed. That machine is called a SAS server, and it may be the same machine where SAS Enterprise Guide is installed (in which case, it is called a local server) or it may be a separate machine (called a remote server). SAS runs in many operating environments and on many types of computers. Any computer running SAS can be a SAS server as long as you have access to that machine.

You may have more than one SAS server. For example, you might have SAS installed on both your desktop computer and on a mainframe computer. In that case, you can use SAS Enterprise Guide to run analyses on either computer. When you run a SAS program, you can specify which server you want to use. When you submit a task, it will run on the server where the data table is stored.

SAS has many different products. To run SAS Enterprise Guide, you need only a few. You must have Base SAS software installed on your SAS server. If you have a remote SAS server, you may need a product called SAS Integration Technologies. If you want to run statistical analyses, then you must also have SAS/STAT software. For running econometric time series analyses, you need SAS/ETS software. For graphics, you need SAS/GRAPH software. Except in special cases, you probably won't need SAS/ACCESS software. (See section 2.1 for more information about uisng SAS/ACCESS software with SAS Enterprise Guide.)

Getting Help We have tried to design this book to answer any questions you are likely to have. In addition, SAS Enterprise Guide has extensive built-in help (accessible via the Help menu). If you still have questions, you may want to contact SAS Technical Support. With some software companies, very little technical support is available, or the support is available but only for an extra charge—not so with SAS. All licensed SAS sites have access to SAS Technical Support.

There are several ways to contact SAS Technical Support, including via their Web site, support.sas.com, or via phone at (919) 677-8008. Before you contact SAS Technical Support you must know your site number and the version of SAS Enterprise Guide that you are running. To find these, start SAS Enterprise Guide and select Help About SAS Enterprise Guide. The About SAS Enterprise Guide window will open, displaying both the version of software and your site number.