12/22/23 edits -> 1) Fixed broken links in attached slide deck 2) I'm honored this was the #1 Most Popular SAS Ask-the-Expert learning event for 2023 -> SAS Tech Report: December 2023 update (dsqjvx52uljvw.cloudfront.net)   Watch this Ask the Expert session to learn examples of generating emotion with your visualizations, analytics, reports and dashboards.     Watch the webinar   You will learn: How to compare and contrast typical visualizations with those that might generate emotion. How to make a human connection with your data within your organization. A different way to think about and use SAS Visual Analytics.   The questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar are listed below and the slides from the webinar are attached.   Q&A For accommodating people with color blindness, what is a recommended color palette? https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Accessibility-Features-in-SAS-Visual-Analytics/ta-p/825215 And scroll down to “Use colors with different luminosities for accessibility to color blind users.”  Image shows blue and yellow on left as seen with color vision and blue and yellow on right as seen without color vision.”   Will AI tools be incorporated in VA to build reports? Like loading data and writing the prompt to describe what we are trying to gain from the report? Part 1 of 2 BI without AI is like corn flakes without the milk - SAS Support Communities Part 2 of 2 AI works wonders on your BI, like Organic Milk works wonders on your H... - SAS Support Communities   Can SAS Visual Analytics be used to depict pathways for structural equation modeling and analyze data for the model? If yes, please provide resources to learn more on how to use SAS Visual Analytics. Structural equation modeling is available but through programming currently. Here is the current documentation for the latest version of SAS Viya: https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/pgmsascdc/v_039/statug/statug_introcalis_toc.htm   Does Ted have a formal background in Emotional Psychology? Although he does not, he has many years of SAS Visual Analytics experience working with customers from varying industry groups.  He has experienced many a dashboard that is short lived and others that catch attention and spur action.   This webinar was originally advertised as being loosely based on publicly available research by Doctor Brené Brown. Can you elaborate on that? Doctor Brené Brown studies human connection.  Ted finds the parallels to computer software, the differing usage personas of computer software, and the interaction amongst these usage personas to be fascinating and inspiring.  So thus why he came up with this webinar.  He also gives credit to the various other SMEs as well who are linked on each one of his slides.   Early in Ted’s presentation, was he saying NEVER to use something like MS-Excel. Why? Ted is suggesting NOT to ONLY use something like MS-Excel and NOT to MOSTLY use something like MS-Excel when it comes to invoking emotion with your dashboards.   Which of these recommendations are possible with older versions of SAS Visual Analytics and which require newer releases? All of the capabilities covered can be utilized by ANY release of SAS Visual Analytics with the exception of ... The following features require ANY Viya version of SAS Visual Analytics: Playable Dashboards, SAS Viya jobs integration, and Data Driven Javascript Content integration. The following features require the newer/newest Viya versions of SAS Visual Analytics:  Integration with MS-365, Fair AI Tools and Report Insights.   Any suggestions for accounting for ADHD induced time blindness by the report preparer when creating reports? https://www.verywellmind.com/causes-and-symptoms-of-time-blindness-in-adhd-5216523   When do you feel AI will take over data processing, data analysis, and data storytelling through effective and efficient visualizations? https://www.sas.com/en_us/company-information/innovation/responsible-innovation.html   What would you say to report builders whose responsibility it is to only present info, not persuade the report consumer to any particular action, that is, the consumer is responsible for what, if any action, is indicated by the data? Data owner(s) <-> Report owner(s) <-> Report decision maker(s) should work together as to the best Calls to Action ideally. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-owns-data-appears-your-reports-dashboards-nicola-askham?trk=pulse-article   Is it part of Base SAS and SAS Stat license? Or needs an additional license? In SAS 9.4, SAS Visual Analytics was a separate license. With the newest SAS Viya, Visual Analytics is included.   Will this be presented at upcoming SAS Explore? Hopefully 😊   Recommended Resources Vulnerability in Presentations (includes link within it to Dr. Brené Brown’s ‘Ted Talks’ recording) General information on SAS Visual Analytics Moving from SAS®9 to SAS® Viya® Move to Viya Board Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.   Want more tips? Be sure to subscribe to the Ask the Expert board to receive follow up Q&A, slides and recordings from other SAS Ask the Expert webinars.     ... View more

*** Note: I’m soliciting feedback/ideas before this webinar even takes places, see Comment section at end of presentation abstract below ***   Dr. Brené Brown's famous quote   SAS Visual Analytics stories are data with a soul   Thursday, June 1 st at 11 a.m. Eastern Registration page -> click here   What does it mean to have a soul?  You'll know soul is evoked when you feel something deeply, for when something touches us deeply, we say it "touches my soul."  Dr. Brené Brown delivered a TEDx (Ted Talks) presentation on the power of vulnerability.  One of her main themes of that presentation is that inspiration is not in delivering data (per se); but rather, inspiration is in telling stories about the data and how the data can help us lead better lives.  Data wrapped in stories can move people, elicit emotion, and inspire people to take action.    Aristotle claimed that in order to persuade, you need to rely on three complementary argument types: appeal to ethics (ethos); appeal to logic (logos) and appeal to emotion (pathos).  This Ask-the-Expert webinar will address examples of generating emotion with your visualizations, analytics, reports and dashboards.  In this new world of remote work (multi-tasking work and non-work activities) as well as “silent quitting”, it’s much harder to catch the attention of co-workers and management to act on what should be critical work matters.  In turn, you will hopefully make a human connection with your report consumers.    This Ask-the-Expert webinar will begin with typical visualizations that do not elicit emotion.  It will then showcase seven example areas that could enable you to tell your most impactful story with your data from an emotional persuasion point of view:  Color Selection  Bias Detection Time Perception  Sentiment Analysis  Animation, Images and Video  Call to Action / Why / Because Can “Generative AI” help evoke human emotion in your report viewers  The webinar will conclude with what to think about in creating a consumer-centric report that moves people to action specifically within your own organizations.  Webinar follow-up will include resources where to get more details on topics covered.    Thursday, June 1 st at 11 a.m. Eastern Register Now ... View more

      The companion summary video to this article can be found here. It is part of the SAS How To Tutorials video series.   As a Technical Advisor on the SAS Visual Analytics (VA) adoption team, I empathize with those users who have grown accustomed to point-and-click development of their reports, dashboards, and data storytelling (including the data preparation necessary to facilitate such endeavors).  Self-Service Data Preparation has been inherent within SAS VA for several past releases.  In recent times, there has been a growing field known as Data & Analytics Engineering.  Analytic teams (which have now absorbed report, dashboard and data storytelling initiatives and resources) need better support to build data pipelines for whatever BI question they happen to be working on.   SAS VA users do not have to necessarily now learn coding to transform data into clean, reliable data sets for analysis and having to learn and apply software engineering best practices to analytics code and data pipelines.  The same SAS Studio that has modernized SAS data and analytics programming efforts with an interactive development environment can be used in the following manner as well.         I personally went through the process of learning SAS Studio for SAS Viya and seeing how wonderful it is to work with in concert with SAS VA.  What follows are 10+ example areas that a SAS VA user (or any SAS Viya visual product interface) should embrace.  I encourage users to comment back at the end of this community article as to what listed or additional features within SAS Studio benefited you personally or your organization specifically from a Low Code / No Code point of view.           I intentionally utilized a SAS Viya system where I have NO system administration authorizations (e.g., SAS Environment Manager, CLI, Kubernetes, etc.) to mimic the true experiences of a typical point-and-click SAS VA user as close as possible.   The data files used for the following illustrations can be found in the attached LowNoCodeSASStudio.zip.  In the business story line simulated (a fictitious telecommunications company), our analysts are interested in churners (customers who discontinue service).  In this scenario, the company has customer data from 3 data sources (each from a different department): Accounts, Billings and Equipments.  They would like (among other needs) to join all 3 datasets, remove some missing values and run some analyses.  The combined data needs to end up in-memory to the SAS VA user community (or any SAS Viya visual product interface).    I used my personal SAS Server/Home location (to upload source data), WORK data library (for temporary created target data), CASUSER CASLIB data library (for in-memory created target data), and My Folder location (for created SAS Studio content) as assigned by my systems administrator per my log-in to my SAS Viya system.  In a real-life customer Test and Production environments, you’ll want the end result in-memory tables (for SAS VA) to reside in a publicly available (group authorization) global session CASLIB.  If source data or SAS Studio content needs to be shared as well in your environment, you’ll want to work with your SAS Viya system administration.   More information on where are the files that you have access to through SAS Studio can be found here.     Quick access to server and local storage data   We will perform the ‘Upload files’ (only for now) based on a different example documented here.  Be sure to open the Explorer panel on the left-hand side of SAS Studio to enable the following.       More detailed information on SAS Studio accessing data into SAS Viya can be found here.     Multi-step (orchestrated) data engineering   A flow is a sequence of operations on data.  Data and operations are represented in the flow by nodes.  A flow can include a series of nodes in which the output of one node is the input to another node.  As you build a flow, SAS Studio automatically generates SAS code for each node. You can use flow to prepare data for reporting and analysis.  We will end up with everything depicted in the following screen capture after step series #4 later within this write-up (be sure to connect the steps within the flow).         You also have the ability to control the execution order of individual flows within a flow file in SAS Studio.  This is done by grouping the individual flows (or nodes) into "swimlanes" and specifying the order in which the "swimlanes" are executed.     In the meantime, we want to end up with the source file references and imports (with Horizontal Flow Layout which helps with debugging if issues arise).  Take advantage of horizontal re-sizing of screen.         Accounts.txt is space delimited and should have 3,714 records and 5 columns.  Billings.txt is tab delimited and should have 3,714 records and 6 columns.  Equipments.xlsx is an Excel data sheet and should have 3,715 records and 3 columns.  Be sure to save the flow to Folder Shortcuts -> Shortcut to MyFolder.      3. More and enhanced data transformation capabilities     There are a multitude of SAS data manipulation functions at your disposal within SAS Studio.  Working with a Query, we will re-format (with calculated columns), re-order and filter some of the data.  The result will be a will be a join of all three imported source tables.  Although all of this may have been possible through one Query, to re-emphasize the nature and benefits of multi-step (orchestrated) data engineering, we will add these to our existing flow (this is just a small sampling of overall capability):         Some of the character data needs to be numeric (SAS INPUT function expression) and vice versa (SAS PUT function expression and with COMPRESS).  Before our users create tables, charts, etc. we want to also remove missing data from the variable Target_Churn since they are interested in doing an analysis on this variable.  Target_Churn=1 means the customer has churned (left) and 0 means the customer has remained.  We will remove the missing values for this variable by filtering the data.  We were asked to move Target_Churn and Current_Bill_Range right after Account_ID (as the first three data items in order) since they are important variables to the users.  When performing the join do not add the 2 extra occurrences of Account_ID.  The join should result in 3,694 rows and 12 columns.         solution for Account_ID_Char -> COMPRESS(PUT(t1.Account_ID,9.))      4. Loading/refreshing data to SAS VA (or any SAS Viya visual product interface)     Snippets are lines of re-usable and re-purposeable code templates.  Snippets can contain SAS code, XML code or text. You can insert Snippets into Program Editor, XML editor, text editor, flows, job definitions, job forms or job prompts.  SAS Studio is shipped with several code Snippets.  One benefit to SAS VA (or any SAS Viya visual product interface) is Load Data to CASLIB.  We will only use the Load SAS data set from a Base engine library part of the code and make edits to correspond to our data within the flow.  First, we will create a temporary output table connected from the previous steps so it can serve as our physical base table from which to create the in-memory target and for other examples that follow.         Final load code is in LoadCUSTCHURNfromWORK2CAS.sas in the attached LowNoCodeSASStudio.zip.      5. User-defined data formats     SAS provides formats for controlling how variables are displayed. You can use the FORMAT procedure in your SAS programs to create your own formats. The FORMAT procedure supports the creation of user-defined formats in catalogs on the SAS Compute Server. It also supports adding formats and format libraries for a SAS Cloud Analytic Services session.  This will be our first opportunity and only time within the context of this article where we would have had to write all of our code from scratch 😊 but you can copy/paste the provided code.  It is based on this referenced white paper (which describes various ways to accomplish the same user-defined outcomes).  This is also the only topic within the context of this article where a SAS Viya system administration authorization is required after a FORMAT is created by a SAS Studio user so it can be accessible outside of SAS Studio by any SAS Viya visual product interface.  Documentation guidance and best practices are available.   Code example as it applies to the previous steps (i.e. it assumes the SAS Studio To VA flow has run successfully first) can be found in UserDefinedFormatExample.sas in the attached LowNoCodeSASStudio.zip.  SASStudioSuperUserLoadFormatsSample.sas is an example of what that user authorization could then do without leaving their SAS Studio session to make them globally available.           6. Examine data tasks     SAS Studio is shipped with several predefined point-and-click tasks (organized into categories). Some categories and their tasks might not be available at your site because you do not have the required SAS license.  Although we will be looking at this slightly out of order, the Examine Data Tasks are suggested prior to loading your data into SAS VA (or any SAS Viya visual product interface).  It could help in discovering which data needs to be transformed.  Other suggestions (though not depicted here) include the Visualize Data Tasks as preliminary SAS VA usage (where the final production report/dashboard/data story will reside), as well as any of the statistical tasks as preliminary usage to any SAS Viya visual product interface (where the final production analytical models will reside).         7. SAS Studio results output options     Any SAS Studio functionality that produces output places it in HTML format by default.  You can set the Results Preferences to include any/all of HTML, PDF, Word, RTF, Excel or PPT formats, each with differing output styles.  You can customize the SAS Studio output environment to generate output for other output destinations or use a custom style for your output.               8. Create and schedule jobs     With our flow after step series #4 above (or from any saved flow), we can schedule it as a job.  In the New Trigger window, specify how frequently to run the job.  You can also specify the time at which the job should run and the start date and the end date for running the job.         If multiple flows need to be dependent of each other, it is recommended to perform this as a SAS Viya system administration function.  Documentation guidance and suggested tips are available.     9. SAS Viya jobs also to create custom SAS VA functionality     SAS Viya jobs are not limited to flows.  You can use jobs for web reporting, performing analytics, building web applications and delivering content to clients such as SAS Studio.  These jobs can access any SAS data source or external file and create tables, files, or other data targets that are supported by SAS.  You can create an HTML form or task prompt to provide a user interface to the job. When the user selects an option to submit the information, the data that is specified is passed to a SAS session as global macro variables. The SAS program runs, and the results are returned to the web browser.  This is a neat way to create custom SAS VA functionality.  As an example, we will use CASUSER.CUSTCHURN (from previous examples) and SAS Tasks -> Visualize Data -> Graph -> Mosaic Plot to generate the code we need for the job (that will run on-demand and not scheduled).  Do NOT use WORK.CUSTCHURN as it’s temporary.         Copy and paste the code into a new Job Definition.  We will add ODS graphics on and off statements so the output can render in the interfaces outside of SAS Studio and then close out nicely.  The metadata folder where this is saved is where the SAS VA report will need to access.         Code above can be found in Code4ViyaJob4VAExample.txt in the attached LowNoCodeSASStudio.zip.   The job content object within SAS VA enables you to display the output from the SAS Viya jobs.         10. Prepare and explore data tasks (for the SAS Visual Statistics and SAS Visual Data Mining & Machine Learning user)     Preparing data for analytical modeling within any SAS Viya visual product interface can be performed by the SAS Viya Prepare and Explore Data tasks (e.g. Imputation by choosing which columns get which types of imputation).  We will run through Partitioning as an example to simulate creating Training, Validation and Test for model evaluation purposes.  These can run directly on in-memory data.         We will then use the code generated as basis to alter the original flow from step series #4 (a different saved version of it for backup purposes) and follow the trick documented here to run PROC PARTITION and global promote the in-memory table within the same set of code by utilizing CAS ACTIONS.  This likewise will make the in-memory table available outside of our SAS Studio session.         Last step code above is in WithPartitionLoadCUSTCHURN2CAS.sas in attached LowNoCodeSASStudio.zip.       Bonus. Custom Steps   Custom Steps enable you to create a user interface for other users at your site to complete a specific task.  Custom Steps are saved to SAS Content, so they can be shared with others at your site.  Currently, Custom Steps are utilized in a flow.  Future product plans include the ability to run them stand-alone (as a http URL, for example).  Going through the three examples depicted within the documentation, make the following changes if desired: * Instead of using SASHELP.CLASS -> use CASUSER.PART_CAS_CUSTCHURN (from example #10 above) * Instead of using Age -> use Num_Acct_Age_Months * Instead of using Height -> use Num_Avg_Days_Deliquent * Instead of using Weight -> use Num_Avg_Talk_Hrs         For more information on Custom Steps, please consult these community articles and instructional video.     CONCLUSION         As the name suggests, Low Code / No Code is a method of performing functionality with little or no coding.  This enables users to drag-and-drop pre-configured blocks, and create simple to advanced, enterprise-grade pipelines.  Utilizing SAS Studio in such a manner within the same interface as those who prefer coding has the added benefit to the SAS community of sharing and collaborating in Data & Analytics Engineering projects.  And it’s a seamless integration switching between the SAS VA “programming” environment (SAS Studio) and the SAS VA explore & visualize design environment (SAS VA itself).  Again, we look forward to reading your comments at the end of this community article as to what listed or additional features within SAS Studio benefited you personally or your organization specifically from a Low Code / No Code point of view.         [Update] SAS Studio 2021.2.3 (January 2022) was utilized for the above demonstration.  Since then, 2021.2.4 (February 2022) has introduced two new additional Low Code / No Code capabilities:  Load Database Table and Notes.  Going forward, to keep up to date with new SAS Studio features (regardless if related to Low Code / No Code), please consult the What's New Guide on a regular basis. ... 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(note:  this is an evolving blog – current as of 2021.1.5 September 2021 release - that may be continuously edited as SAS Viya 4 capabilities are updated or added)   It’s no surprise that as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, people have become more health and wellness aware.  The most obvious change in consumer behavior is the increased popularity in organic and plant-based ingredients.  For example, there are seven ways organic milk works wonders on your health.  As I write this posting here about updated and new ways that SAS Visual Analytics (VA) for Viya 4 offers capabilities that fall into the AI-enhanced business intelligence category, it made me re-visit my older post on this topic for earlier releases of SAS VA (BI without AI is like corn flakes without the milk).  So too there are seven areas where SAS VA for Viya 4 have been enhanced, and likewise new features have been introduced to work wonders on your business intelligence, reporting, dashboarding and data visualization workflows (aka BI).   Analogy: AI (Organic Milk) to BI (Health)     For those readers not already familiar with my earlier posting on this topic (or a reminder for those who haven’t read it in a while), artificial intelligence techniques (or augmented analytics) democratize advanced analytics to more users by addressing business problems with automated quantitative insights (what I'm “labeling” as AI within both articles).  This is a sequel to that original posting of mine.  Any capability outlined in the earlier posting not mentioned throughout below is still available in the newest releases of SAS VA.   Only those capabilities that this author considers SAS VA AI-Enhanced BI capabilities are considered here.     New features added since SAS VA for Viya 3.x or 9.4: (in no particular order)   Automatic Report Review SAS VA analyzes your reports and presents information in the Report Review pane that can help you improve their performance. The Report Review pane provides you with a description of each issue and offers suggestions for improvements that you can make to your report or to the data that your report uses.  For a detailed write-up on this new feature, please click here.  Likewise, for a video demonstration recording of this new feature, please click here.  The pane also checks for accessibility issues, which can impact users with color-deficient vision (color blindness) or other visual impairments.   Accessibility More specific to Accessibility issues, in addition to Report Review, there have been several additions to SAS VA including (but not limited to): Text objects enable you to mark text as a heading. Marking headings can improve accessibility for users of screen reader software. You can assign a text label to measure-based display rules. The label is displayed in data tips and on the Display Rules pane when viewing the report. The label is also announced by screen reader software. Reference lines in graphs are now accessible to screen readers. For more detailed guidance on creating Accessible reports using SAS VA and the capabilities offered, please consult this documentation link.   Logarithmic scale A new Logarithmic scale option is available for scatter plots, time series plots, line charts, forecasting objects, and numeric series plots.  There are two main reasons to use logarithmic scales in charts and graphs. The first is to respond to skewness towards large values (i.e., cases in which one or a few points are much larger than the bulk of the data, e.g. if you wanted to compare net worth of individuals worth $40,000 and $800,000,000).  The second is to show percent change or multiplicative factors.   Outlier Insights & Detection The new Insights window identifies possible outlier values in the data for the objects in your report.  If outlier values are detected, then the lightbulb (aka insights were found) icon appears in the report toolbar.  Likewise, measures in the Data pane are automatically checked for potential outlier values.  The Outlier icon appears beside measures that might have outlier values.  Outlier detection can be disabled by the Disable automatic outlier detection for the Data pane user setting and the disableAutomaticOutlierDetection configuration property.   Automatic Value Grouping When you Create a Custom Category that is based on a measure, you can generate the value intervals automatically by clicking Generate groups in the New Custom Category window. You can also generate a custom category for a measure by right-clicking a measure in the Data pane and selecting New custom category.  You can specify the number of value groups to create and the prefix to use for the names of the generated value groups.   Auto Save in a multi-user / collaborative environment If you are a report designer and you use the autosave feature for reports, the message that indicates that you are working on an older version of the report can be automatically identified by SAS VA if your report has been more recently saved by another user. If you choose to open the updated report, then your autosaved report is discarded. However, if you choose to use the autosaved report, SAS Visual Analytics considers that report to be new and gives it the same name as the initial report.   Conversational AI SAS Visual Analytics for Viya 4 includes the ability to create and configure conversational bots to help users with their tasks.  Each bot is an autonomous program that can interact with users and respond to questions or provide information for a given topic area. SAS Conversation Designer in SAS Viya uses natural language processing along with a collection of intents, utterances, entities and dialogues to process data and provide information to a user. A bot user does not have to present their questions in a special format, but can simply ask questions naturally the way they would pose them to a human.  In the context of SAS Visual Analytics integration, you can display information from a report to embed within your bot.  More information on SAS bot development can be found here.  And more information on SAS bot publishing can be found here.   Only those capabilities that this author considers SAS VA AI-Enhanced BI capabilities are considered here.   Existing features enhanced compared to SAS VA for Viya 3.x or 9.4: (in no particular order)   Note: because these are existing feature updates, it is assumed the reader already knows how these capabilities facilitate AI-enhanced business intelligence.  If you are new to SAS Visual Analytics in general please consult the various resource links throughout below after reviewing this original write-up on this topic.   Automated Explanation (including Explain Data) & Automated Prediction * The automated explanation object now displays geographic maps when the response variable is a measure and the selected underlying factor is a geography. * The automated explanation & prediction objects support the following additional languages: Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Thai, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish. * SAS VA now displays a notification when automated explanation objects in the background are finished loading results. * Automated explanation objects identify extreme values (possible outliers) in the characteristics summary. The full list of values is displayed in the Anomalies tab of the details table. * You can explain the characteristics of data items that are assigned to any object. This feature enables consumers of a report to quickly access the same summary that is provided by the automated explanation object. * Automated explanation objects list the most important factors in the summary description. * You can explain characteristics of members of hierarchies that are assigned to an object. * The automatic explanation object includes a forecast of future values when you assign the new Time data role. * In the Automated explanation object, groups are no longer calculated and displayed by default. You can select the Show high and low groups option to calculate groups. * For objects that contain multiple visual elements (for example, automated explanation, automated prediction, and advanced analytical objects), the Displayed visuals option enables you to select the elements that are displayed.   Object Templates for Analytical Objects Although the ability to create basic object templates is not new (or page templates for that matter), the new Object Templates for Analytical Objects should enable report developers to think of many new use cases for re-use and re-purpose of analytical insightful dashboard designs that now more integrate with SAS Visual Statistics and SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning.  Recall this older posting by the same author on the importance of analytical insightful dashboards.   Decision Trees * Decision trees have a new High cardinality predictors option that enables a greater cardinality limit for the categorical predictor values at each node. * When you create a new partition data item, you can stratify based on a category variable. * When you register a model (not just Decision Trees), you can now specify the model repository where the model is stored. * Decision trees can now display validation statistics in each node and in the details table. * The Interactive Decision Tree mode is improved with a new Split Node window. This window enables you to better specify the split variable, number of branches, split points, and how missing values are treated.  The Split Node window has been enhanced to enable better control over the number of splits and how they are created. You can now prune and split an interior node in the same action. * The process for splitting a decision tree has been enhanced. * Generated text is now localized in the following objects: forecasting, network analysis, path analysis, and text topics.  If SAS Visual Statistics is not licensed at your site, then the basic decision tree also has localized generated text.   Network Analysis * Options for the network analysis object have changed. The new Network structure option and Link type option specify the structure and link directionality for the network. * The stress centrality metric for network analysis objects is no longer available. For reports that you promote from previous releases, the stress centrality metric is changed to betweenness centrality. * The calculation of network metrics for the network analysis object now uses a different SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS) action set (the network action set). Some results might be different from previous releases.   Working with Data items Example use cases of what is now possible can be found here. * Displaying the earliest or latest value for the selected date or datetime item is now possible. * You can now assign a Date format or a Datetime format to a calculated data item. * Date and Datetime values can now be used as a number in calculated expressions. * The properties list in the Data pane now includes a read-only preview of the expression for calculated data items. Only five lines of the expression are displayed. You can click Edit beside the expression in the list of properties to open the Edit Calculated Item window. * The expression editor window for calculated items and advanced filters has been enhanced with a new layout. * A filter field is now available when you select data items to create new filters, ranks, and display rules. * A new search field in the Options pane enables you to find specific options by using label names. * You can now display a search field in the list control. The search field enables report users who are designing or editing reports to find specific values that they want to select or clear in the list. * The Add Data Items pop-up window has a new Select all check box. * You can edit the calculated expression for geography data items that are based on a calculated item.   Geo-spatial Analysis For a Getting Started with Geo Analytics in SAS VA, please consult the linked recorded webinar and material.  Enhanced features that have been released for Viya 4 since then include: * For geo coordinate and geo region-coordinate objects, the Enable data label thinning option hides data labels as needed to avoid overlapping text. * Geography items have a predefined role for three-letter ISO codes. * For geo coordinate objects and geo region-coordinate objects, new options enable you to control the size of markers and bubbles. * You can disable zoom and pan controls in geomap objects. * The geo line and geo line-coordinate objects enable you to display line segments on a map. You can use geo line maps and geo line-coordinate maps to display linear geographical features such as roads, railroads, pipelines, bus routes, and so on. * The geographical lookup values for SAS Visual Analytics have been updated with the following changes:  1) The country name for Macedonia is changed to North Macedonia; 2) Localization support for country subregions is improved. For example, the subregions of India now support names in Devanagari script in addition to Latin characters. * The maxRowsLookup.geoLine configuration property specifies the maximum number of result rows for polylines in a geo line map that is in SAS Visual Analytics reports. For more information, see Configuration Properties: Report Data Service. * The OpenStreetMap High Contrast map background is available for geographic maps. The High Contrast map is optimized to provide the best usability for users with low vision.  If you set the map background to Automatic, then the High Contrast map is automatically selected when the high-contrast theme is displayed. * The interface for Create a Geography Data Item By Using Custom Polygonal Shapes, Lines, or Coordinates from a Geographic Data Provider has been enhanced. * Single Sign On (SSO) authentication to an Esri Server for Data Driven Content or SAS Viya jobs is on the product roadmap for an upcoming release.   SAS Viya Jobs   Although this was technically doable since the SAS VA 8.x releases courtesy of Web Content or Data Driven Content, The new job content object enables you to natively connect to and display the output from SAS Viya jobs. You can use jobs to access the functionality of SAS code.  And as was mentioned in the previous version of this posting, although not everything one can incorporate with custom built web content, data driven content or SAS Viya Jobs classifies as true AI-enhanced business intelligence, there are examples that can be developed.   CONCLUSION   Just as consumers are looking for reasons to eat healthier and they want more information about where their food comes from and how it was produced, report “consumers” are looking for reasons to automate their data analysis and they want more information and assistance from the software what is contained in their data and how it should be interpreted.  Any AI-enhanced business intelligence capability you can introduce to your user base, the more you can reduce time-to-insight and increase decision-making speed.  SAS Visual Analytics continues to add or enhance these descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytical capabilities so that citizen data scientists (in a true self-service manner!) can really contribute to their business success.     User Benefits Of AI In Business Intelligence.     ... 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note:  this is an evolving blog that will be continuously updated as interfaces are updated or added   Ted Stolarczyk, Technical Advisor – SAS Visual Analytics Adoption team with input from Anand Chitale & Robby Powell, SAS Visual Analytics Product Management   If you are a Report Consumer - someone in the organization who interacts with SAS Visual Analytics (VA) reports, and has authorization/authentication applied (or is a guest access user) - then you are considered a Viewer.   Now everyone can easily discover and share powerful insights that inspire action.   SAS supports the needs for "Viewers" of all sorts, whereby Viewers = Consumers (of insights).  This write-up explains to SAS VA Community Users how to get to know how smart-flexible-anywhere SAS Visual Analytics is with the seamless viewer interfaces available with SAS 9.4 and Viya.  They each provide seamless access to insights from SAS, in a highly visual and interactive way, across the most familiar channels our users use – be it on the web, mobile apps, Microsoft 365/Office tools or enterprise portals.  SAS Visual Analytics brings the uniqueness of unified experience to discover and share powerful insights that inspire action.   These interfaces can be categorized five different ways: 1) Web Viewers 2) Mobile Apps 3) Microsoft 365/Office tools 4) Enterprise needs 5) Share & Collaborate   1. Web Viewers   This is a typical SAS VA report view with only those deemed Report Authors having the ability to create/alter report/data structure design.     a. SAS Visual Analytics – in view mode   Intended audience: A regular web browser viewer, in simplest terms, is a report that is designed to be accessible on all devices such that the content gets fit as per the device screen.  SAS Visual Analytics is the only product that enables you to create reports that automatically work on both desktop displays and mobile devices.  Although this notion of write-once-view-anywhere is possible, when designing reports with a diversity of consumers in mind, careful consideration needs to be apportioned amongst Usability, Performance, Viewer Customizations, Device Majority and Accessibility.  You may then find it beneficial to take advantage of other viewer options as well that are outlined throughout below.  Visual data story telling can be achieved using a combination of any/all of these interface options.   Viewers can still be granted report change capabilities while they are in view mode.   b. Progressive Web App (PWA)   Intended audience: Over the past years, browser technologies have significantly progressed and started delivering the rich desktop experience to millions of users. Through PWA technology, SAS now provides a rich and responsive  SAS Visual Analytics experience that further extends access to SAS assets such as data, models, jobs and many others with a unified experience across SAS applications.  Starting in the 2021.1.2 release of Viya 4, you can Install the SAS Visual Analytics as a Progressive Web App through your browser (Chrome, Firefox, MS Edge or Safari) if running through https secure communication.  The benefits of PWA include application persistence, desktop experience, renaming instances to quickly access different environments, and possible performance improvements.   In Chrome, the icon to install is in the address bar. The Install SAS option might be under another menu. For example, within MS Edge it is located under Apps.   2. Mobile Apps   Intended audience: Organizations need insights anytime/anywhere. There are thousands of users who need insights on the go. SAS Visual Analytics fits right into this modern user approach with specific mobile apps and the corresponding daily consumer needs.   Device OS specific Apps including Report customizations in View mode   a. SAS Visual Analytics App for iOS devices SAS Visual Analytics App for iOS: Help Center   b. SAS Visual Analytics App for Android devices SAS Visual Analytics App for Android: Help Center   c. SAS Visual Analytics App for Windows 10 devices (SAS 9.4 and Viya 3.x only) SAS Visual Analytics App for Windows: Help Center   SAS PWA (see 1b. above) will be the replacement for SAS Viya 4 customers on Windows 10 devices.  With SAS web applications now supporting PWA technology, SAS can deliver the expected desktop experience of the Win10 App to our users and further expand the scope of capabilities beyond reports to everything SAS web applications can provide with governance.    3. Microsoft 365/Office tools   Intended audience: Microsoft 365/Office is THE leading platform to drive productivity at home and in the workplace. Whether it's managing email in Outlook, or building analysis spreadsheets in Excel, Office has made carrying out many computer-based tasks easier for all of us.  As part of the SAS-Microsoft partnership, we will continue to offer native integrations between SAS and Microsoft Office technologies.  These integrations will empower all users – from data scientists and citizen developers to business users – to quickly and easily incorporate analytics into everything they do, from making sense of data and building custom applications to creating reports and dashboards and more. With pervasive, user-friendly analytics at their fingertips, everyone will be able to maximize productivity, focus on what’s most important, and make better, data-driven decisions all the time.  Those running SAS 9.4 or Viya 3.x, and not requiring the full depth and breadth of MS-Office support, can opt to run the SAS Visual Analytics Add-In for Office instead.   a. Add-in for MS-Excel (SAS 9.4 and Viya 3.x only)   b. Add-in for MS-PowerPoint (SAS 9.4 and Viya 3.x only)   c. Add-in for MS-Word (SAS 9.4 and Viya 3.x only)   A basic example of inserting a SAS VA Report into MS Word and interacting with it   d. Add-in for MS-Outlook (SAS 9.4 and Viya 3.x only)   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   All of the Web Viewer, Mobile Apps and Microsoft Office Tools outlined throughout above can collaborate/comment on report, a page, or an object together at the same time (including attachments). Commenting/Attachment capabilities for Microsoft 365 is on the product roadmap.    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   e. SAS for Microsoft 365 (Viya 4.x only) SAS customers have historically run SAS tasks and viewed results from inside their Microsoft Office suite. To streamline how people work, SAS and Microsoft have built a SAS for Microsoft 365 add-in for Excel for the Mac, Windows and web, which can be centrally deployed and managed by IT.  By developing integrations such as this one across our respective technologies, we are improving the data interchange between SAS servers and Microsoft 365 products. Users can seamlessly incorporate data enrichment and analytic outputs generated by SAS solutions to increase efficiency in their workflows.  For example, using the Excel add-in, they can query data, view reports and embed rich visualizations.   Future plans for supporting other Microsoft 365 tools are coming over the next 12 months on Viya 4 with more enriched capabilities to support both desktop and online office documents (above and beyond just Excel).  For example, new with the 2021.2.5 (March 2022) release you can now access SAS for Microsoft 365 in Outlook.  When composing or replying to a message or creating or updating an appointment, you can insert the HTML of a report object.  You can also include a link to the live report. In addition, you can attach a PDF of a report object or an entire report.   SAS for Microsoft 365: Help Center   The SAS pane is your workspace for SAS for Microsoft 365.  For a video demo snippet of this Microsoft 365 Excel integration, click below ... (no audio)   4. Enterprise Needs   The viewer user for any of the scenarios described below would be the consumer of the respective published application after it’s developed by somebody else (except where noted).   a. SAS Visual Analytics SDK – available with SAS Viya   (1) Enterprise Portals   Intended audience: The SAS Visual Analytics SDK allows you to embed your SAS Visual Analytics content on the web, as either a full report or its individual parts. The SDK achieves this by connecting to a SAS Viya server to access the report content and data, and then renders interactive report content directly in your HTML page. Accessing a SAS Viya server from the SDK requires some basic server configuration, but after this is completed you can begin embedding your SAS Visual Analytics insights with lines of Javascript code.   The Copy Link window generates the needed element tags and arguments for the SAS VA SDK Javascript developer.   (2)  Report Packages   Intended audience: One of the newest “viewer” features in Viya 4, Export Report Package will appear as a menu item on the overall SAS VA context menu.  It is intended to be used in conjunction with the SAS Visual Analytics SDK (see above) to embed insights from SAS Visual Analytics reports into your custom web pages and portals for the purposes of scale of delivery.  This Publish capability allows users to publish a snapshot of their data and query results for a given set of report objects, report pages, and reports. The resulting output is a SAS Report Package (report-package-name.sasreport.zip).  Although this is not intended to be a true off-line report viewer solution, the report package includes all of the data needed to display the selected report objects, as well as the query results for every combination of filter selections that can be performed in view mode.   VA Publish is also available through the SAS Viya CLI through the reports plug-in, build-package command. You can script the SAS Viya CLI calls to generate report packages based on any schedule or alert that you choose.     An example of a site utilizing the SAS Visual Analytics SDK can be found -> here To understand and track COVID-19’s effect on industries and economies, The Economist Intelligence Unit, with support from SAS, launched the Global Business Barometer (GBB). These barometer readings contemplate a recovery as sentiment in different regions and depicts differing impacts across business sectors.     b. SAS Visual Analytics Mobile SDK (iOS and Android) – available with SAS Viya   Intended audience: Create mobile apps that include SAS Visual Analytics content. The SAS Mobile SDK enables you to personalize, preconfigure and customize these apps. You can include a corporate theme and logo, as well as preload specific reports and embed SAS Visual Analytics content.  You can also manage and secure your mobile deployments by integrating your apps with your mobile device management service. Your mobile apps can connect to your SAS servers and can be managed by your organization's SAS administrators.  The SAS Mobile SDK is free and is available for iOS and Android devices from developer.sas.com.  One example of many use cases for this viewer option is to convey your brand identity.   An example of a custom mobile app built with the SAS SDK is GatherIQ, a free app that is part of the SAS Data for Good program.   c. SAS Conversational Designer (Viya 4.x only)   Intended audience: Create and configure conversational bots to help users with their tasks. Each bot is an autonomous program that can interact with users and respond to questions or provide information for a given topic area. SAS Conversation Designer in SAS Viya uses natural language processing along with a collection of intents, utterances, entities and dialogues to process data and provide information to a user. A bot user does not have to present their questions in a special format, but can simply ask questions naturally the way they would pose them to a human.  In the context of SAS Visual Analytics integration, you can display information from a report to embed within your bot.  The viewer user for this scenario would be either the bot developer or the bot consumer after the bot is published.   Examples of SAS VA integration with Conversational Designer include Loading a Report, Loading Data for a Visualization within a Report, Display a Report object visualization as an Image, Filter Data and Apply a Rank and Set a Prompt Value within a Report.   5. Share & Collaborate   The viewer user for any of the scenarios described in this section would be the recipient of the applicable Share, Distribution, or Export.   a. Share to SAS Drive (available with SAS Viya)   Intended audience: You can share a report directly with a recipient, who can open it from SAS Drive.  SAS Drive (the viewer user in this scenario) is a hub for SAS Viya applications (not just SAS Visual Analytics) that enables you to easily view, organize, and share your content from one place.  The availability of the features in SAS Drive depends on the applications that have been installed, and the features and permissions that have been specified by your administrator.  One example of many use cases for this option is report development/testing prior to rolling it out to production.   SAS Drive can also collaborate/comment/make attachments with fellow Web Viewer, Mobile Apps and MS Office Tools users.     b. Report Distribution to E-mail   Intended audience: For those not requiring (or in addition to) the full SAS Add-in for Microsoft Outlook (see 3 a-e above) for viewer users, you can distribute reports using SAS Visual Analytics.  Distributing reports automates the process of delivering updated content to report users. You can distribute reports once or at recurring intervals, such as daily, multiple times daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly.  The Distribute Report window enables you to schedule, un-schedule, run now, and delete the distributions that you are authorized to view.  The recipient’s e-mail inbox would simply serve as the viewer user in this scenario.  The email for a report distribution contains a link to the report (additional viewing option).  You can specify whether you want to include a PDF (yet another viewing option), a summary, or both.  As a side note, the report developer also has the option of creating alert notifications that can email a viewer user triggered by a set of data conditions in a report. For example, an alert can be configured to notify somebody when the value of a measure is negative.  You can use the Display Rules pane to add alerts when you create an expression-based display rule.  You can specify how frequently the system checks to see whether the alert condition has been met. You can also specify how often users are notified.   note: Report Summary feature not depicted here.  c. Export               (1) PDF               Intended audience: PDF is the de facto standard for electronic documents, portability and viewing.  PDF files allow authors to layout and style content as they see fit, confident that the document will invariably appear and print the same way, regardless of computer, operating system, PDF reader, software version or network connection status.  In the context of SAS Visual Analytics, you can export a PDF for a report, a page in a report, or an object. You can then print the PDF.  By default, an appendix is included in the PDF if the report, page, or object has descriptions, filters, warnings, errors, or display rule legends.   There are some considerations for printing these PDFs. Please consult the documentation link provided for details.     (2) to Excel   Intended audience: For those not requiring the full SAS Add-in for Microsoft Excel (see 3 a-e above) for viewer users, you can export data or an Excel workbook from a report object using SAS Visual Analytics.  Users can export data from objects to Microsoft Excel format for future viewing or printing. This exported output can be saved locally on disk, and then opened in Excel.  Or, you can choose to create a data file. The data file can be a tab-separated values (TSV) file or a comma-separated values (CSV) file.  Starting in the 2020.1.1 release of Viya 4, SAS Visual Analytics can preserve the crosstab or the list table structure when you export data to an Excel workbook.   When you export analytics objects, Excel workbook is the only available file type. When you open the exported file in Excel, each part of the object has a separate worksheet tab.   (3)  as Image   Intended audience: For those not requiring the full SAS Add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint (see 3 a-e above) for viewer users, you can Export an Image of an Object.  You can export an image for any list table, crosstab, graph, or gauge in a report.  This is useful if you want to include the image of a report object in a presentation, such as in Microsoft PowerPoint.  Images are saved as PNG files.   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   CONCLUSION   Correlating a software capability or feature to a use case has always enabled our customers to see how we can solve a particular business problem.  In the same fashion, this write-up related how users can view/interact with reports built from SAS Visual Analytics to its Viewer application scenarios (over 20 of them!) with an explanation of each.  This should be of great value as you can correlate your daily workstreams and understand how SAS Visual Analytics supports the needs for "consumers" of all sorts.           ... 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Did you miss the Ask the Expert session on getting the most from AI-Enhanced BI with SAS ® Visual Analytics for SAS ® Viya ® ? Not to worry, you can catch it on-demand at your leisure.    Watch the webinar   During this webinar, I demonstrated the AI-enhanced business intelligence features that are baked right into the latest release of SAS Visual Analytics (VA) for SAS Viya.  In the recording, you will learn: What AI-enhanced BI is and why you need it. An overview of 10+ features within SAS Visual Analytics 8.5 for Viya 3.5 that allow AI-enhanced BI. Which features are available in older releases of SAS Visual Analytics How to determine whether to perform AI or BI first, depending on your data storytelling path.   Here are the questions from the Q&A panel throughout the webinar:   1. How did you run the Automated Explanation report? It looks very powerful, but I missed how you run that in VA 8.5.?  Answer: Note: this feature was called Automated Analysis in SAS VA 8.3.1                                       2. How do some of these AI features like Auto Explanation compare with what a data scientist could do when creating models using Visual Statistics or VDMML? And there was an additional related question ... How would you compare this to Visual Statistics and VDMML?  Answer:  Please see the section paragraph titled What about for the true Data Scientist? within this article that was the basis for this webinar.   3. As a follow-up question to previous Question/Answer directly above ... So then how would you compare Visual Statistics with VDMML? Answer:  Visual Statistics provides objects for descriptive modeling - k-means clustering and "traditional" Machine Learning algorithms like trees, log regression, generalized linear models, etc.  Whereas, VDMML adds more modern Machine Learning models like gradient boosting, random forests, deep Neural Nets, Factorization Machines, etc.  VDMML also offers different levels of automation courtesy of provided Model Studio.   Relating to SAS Model Studio there was a question asked ... I was in Model Studio and built some models.  I went to view results and only found variable importance but can't find the variable impact.  For logistic regression model for example, I can't find the odds ratios.  Could you tell me how to get that information?  Answer:  Odds ratios can be calculated as part of post-fitting using the logisticOddsRatio action which is part of the Regression Action set.  This can be accessed through a coding approach (like using PROC CAS in SAS) to program the options for logistic regression in CAS. It is not offered as an option through the logistic regression node in Model Studio as this is typically used more for inferential modelling rather than predictive modelling with large data. You could include this code through a code node in the pipeline.   4. How does SAS VA mapping compare to SAS/GIS from SAS 9.4. Or do we work with SAS/GIS? And there was an additonal related question ... Do you have any feel how this compares to packages like ESRI? There was also a third related question ... Can you give/send a detailed demo or post something on your blog for the Geomap capabilities that you demoed?   Answer:  SAS VA has built-in geo spatial analysis capabilities that are courtesy of Open Street Map and ESRI. SAS VA does NOT compete with Open Street Map and ESRI.  We provide the data and Visual Analytics functionality.  They provide the geo map (i.e. boundary) layers. For more information, please see the section paragraph titled Demographic data within this article that was the basis for this webinar.   5. There was a mention of "modernization of the SAS Stored Process".  Can you provide more details on that? Answer:  Please read this article for those details.   6. Is it possible to do a 'Heat map' in what was being demonstrated?  Answer:  Yes.  It was not demonstrated because this wouldn't be officially considered AI-Enhanced Business Intelligence by organizations like Gartner 😊 For more information on 'Heat map' functionality, please consult the documentation here. There was an unrelated question but the answer lends itself to 'Heat map' ... Does the Correlation shown screen out categorical variables?  Answer:  Yes. The Correlation Matrix only uses measures. A heat map might be better to represent relationships between categories and measures.    7. Was that SIRI or Alexa in the video you showed? Answer:  The voice assistant feature built into SAS Visual Analytics App for iOS is separate from Siri or Alexa. The voice assistant does not respond to Siri or Alexa commands. Note:  SAS Visual Analytics Product Management are looking for real-life business use cases you could apply voice assistant to your every day work.  If you could please share these example use cases, please comment back at the bottom of the following article, thank you and much appreciated.   8. Have you compared the AutoML with trees (and other models) developed by Experts? Answer:  Often times the AutoML algorithms provide better results than first run models by experts.  However, Auto Explanation (and similar black box machine learning) only uses a subset of modeling algorithms so a data scientist that can use business knowledge with a broader range of models and advanced data prep can do better.  Think of these capabilities being demonstrated here as a starting point for model development.     9. How do you find the independent variable impact (positively or negatively) on the target (aka response or dependent) variable? Answer:  To get more details within any visual that is analytical in nature, click on the 'Maximize' icon as depicted in the following screen capture ... a.k.a. Expand, a.k.a. Explorer mode                      10.  What's the minimal version of SAS VA I need for any of the features covered?  Answer: The latest SAS VA 8.5 for Viya 3.5 is preferred for any of these.                                      So then how do I know what version of SAS VA I'm running?  Answer:  When you're within the report building interface, on the upper right of interface, you can click on Help/About to get that information.  An example screen capture from SAS VA 7.5 and SAS VA 8.5 is provided below ...   How do I know if I'm running SAS Visual Analytics 7.5?                                   How do I know if I'm running SAS Visual Analytics 8.5?                                     Recommended Resources a) This webinar was based on the following article. b) When you are ready to apply AI enhanced (or any analytical) capabilities to your reports and dashboards, here is a creative way to go about producing them. c) If you are currently running a version of SAS Visual Analytics that is older than 7.5 and want to explore your upgrade options so you can take full advantage of what was presented during this webinar, please consult this article.   Want more tips? Be sure to subscribe to the Ask the Expert board to receive follow up Q&A, slides and recordings from other SAS Ask the Expert webinars.   ... View more

(note: due to this event being re-scheduled, I'm posting this advertisement here)   Hello SAS Visual Analytics Community,   I will be presenting a live "Ask the Expert" webinar based on this already published article on the re-scheduled date and time of Thursday, July 16th, 2020 from 2 to 3 p.m. EST.  If you already registered, you are still registered. Registration for this upcoming live webinar can be found here.   I hope you'll join me.  I plan on covering ... Certain pairings go so well together: cereal & milk, peanut butter & jelly, wine & cheese, soap & water, or spaghetti & meatballs.  In fact, you couldn’t think of having one of these without the other.  So too should hold true for your business intelligence, reporting, dashboarding and data visualization workflows (aka BI).  Artificial intelligence techniques (or Augmented Analytics) democratize advanced analytics to more users by addressing business problems with automated quantitative insights (what I'm labeling as AI).  The latest release of SAS Visual Analytics 8.5 for Viya 3.5 offers more than 10 capabilities that fall into the AI-enhanced business intelligence category.  Some of these features are available in earlier releases of SAS Visual Analytics 8.x for Viya 3.x.  A few are even available in even older releases.   Want more tips? Be sure to subscribe to the Ask the Expert board to receive follow up Q/A, slides and recordings from other SAS Ask the Expert webinars. To subscribe, select Subscribe from the Options drop down button above the articles. Can't join the live event? You can view this and other Ask the Experts sessions on-demand here. ... View more

(if you want to listen to music while reading this article, click here)       As an extension to the  Flash announcement and corresponding White Paper by SAS Technical Support, this article provides details for users or administrators of the following SAS products: SAS Visual Analytics v7.4 (on SAS 9.4) or prior versions SAS Web Report Studio (part of SAS Enterprise/Business Intelligence, aka E/BI) SAS Information Delivery Portal (part of SAS E/BI) SAS BI Dashboard (part of SAS E/BI) SAS Web OLAP Viewer (part of SAS E/BI) Are you a SAS Data Management user? Check out this article for relevant information on that suite of products.   Introduction   For those of us old enough to remember, the Y2K Problem came and went in a flash (no pun intended ☺) with much fanfare but very little problems in the grand scheme of things.  The Flash issue I want to bring to your attention may not be getting the same fanfare as the Y2K Problem, but it will definitely cause many issues if nothing is proactively done about it.  Adobe announced that it intends to end support for Flash technology and will cease to update and distribute the Flash Player at the end of 2020.  Web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, Safari, etc.) will discontinue and block Adobe Flash by the end-of-life date.  There will be no viable way to deliver existing Flash content ... unless your I.T. department is going to allow you to install and use old versions of web browsers. ☺        Modernization of your SAS investment     Welcome to the age of HTML5.  Previously, applications in SAS 9.4 used the Adobe Flash Player to provide interactive user interfaces.  SAS® Visual Analytics 8.x versions have had a new shiny HTML5 interface since the SAS® Viya release.  But what about customers who still need to run under SAS® 9.4?   SAS® Visual Analytics 7.5 had a new shiny HTML5 interface since the SAS® 9.4 M6 release.  The two options are outlined below.     Option #1. Full modernization to SAS Visual Analytics 8.5 running SAS® Viya 3.5     What has changed?   Completely re-written and includes interactive add-on capabilities interface Exploration and Reporting interfaces combined with the ability to create analytically enhanced visual storytelling with your data More and enhanced mobile device support Why should you use SAS Visual Analytics 8.5 (in addition to above)?   For Visual Analytics 7.4 or prior users, it has: Auto-suggest visuals More MS Excel-like functionality (e.g. Hide or Freeze Columns, Column/Row level formulas, etc.) Keyboard shortcuts Custom organize objects Date-based display rules For E/BI users (in addition to above): Visual Analytics 8.5 has one combined interface that can do just about everything that Web Report Studio, Information Delivery Portal and BI Dashboard can do across separate interfaces, with more and enhanced graphical, filtering, data-formula building, and object/page interaction capabilities. Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio can integrate with Visual Analytics 8.5 like it did with E/BI (i.e., exchanging/sharing data). Office Analytics (aka Add-in for MS-Office) can integrate with Visual Analytics like it did with E/BI (i.e. exchanging/sharing data and opening up/interacting with reports). E/BI had no analytical capabilities unless you built a custom Stored Process and embedded it in your report. Visual Analytics 8.5 has in-memory data architecture that’s better performing vs. E/BI data access being Disk I/O based. Other notable features                                                    Artificial intelligence capabilities Data prep auto-suggest Automated explanation Automated what-if analysis for predictions Auto-tag correlated items Voice recognition on iOS mobile devices Expanded list of derived or advanced formula building (for custom calculations/aggregations) Expanded geo-spatial analysis (courtesy of built-in ESRI software capabilities) Integrate data-driven content from open source Java Script Object and filter templates Tips (i.e., how to modernize)   For a high-level overview of modernizing your existing SAS environment to SAS Visual Analytics 8.5 running SAS Viya 3.5, please consult this white paper and corresponding video.  A more detailed overview can be found in this blog, this community posting and this video. Official web browser support is documented here. Considerations (regarding some of the previous versions usage and content)   SAS Viya jobs mimic what SAS Stored Processes use to do.  SAS Job Execution Web Application mimics what the SAS Stored Process Web Application did.  SAS Studio for SAS Viya can facilitate the creation and deployment of SAS Viya jobs, similar to the way SAS Enterprise Guide did for Stored Processes. SAS Visual Analytics Data Views mimic to a certain extent what SAS Information Maps did.  SAS Visual Analytics can recreate OLAP drill-down using hierarchies unless they contain MDX.  Converting SAS Information Maps or SAS Olap cubes to a SAS Viya-equivalent paradigm is in the works by SAS R&D. If integrating SAS Enterprise Guide or the SAS Add-in for MS-Office with SAS Visual Analytics, specific versions must be utilized to co-exist (preferably the latest release of each).  Please consult this SASNOTE for more details. SAS System Administration is now centralized through the SAS Environment Manager interface.   Option #2. Transitional modernization to SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 running SAS® 9.4 M6 release     What has changed?   Completely re-written interactive interface that looks like SAS Visual Analytics 8.x for SAS Viya 3.x. SAS will provide support for stable releases as long as it can, at various levels of support, that will help customers for their business continuity. Hotfixes, security updates and any other factors that demand releasing an update on top of existing generally available releases will be evaluated and released in time. The same SAS Visual Analytics App (aka Mobile BI) for Windows 10, iOS, and Android supports both SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 and 8.5.  There are periodic updates of these apps (not just feature updates but sometimes newer minimum OS support, UI/UX improvements or more support for viewer customizations). Why should you use SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 (in addition to above)?   If you need to integrate with SAS Solutions that still run under SAS 9.4.  Examples include (but are not limited to) SAS Field Quality Analytics or SAS Fraud Management. SAS Solutions that included Visual Analytics Administration and Reporting (aka VAAR) now offer the following Analytical capabilities in the 7.5 release:  histograms, box plots, heat maps, correlation matrices, forecasting and scatter plots with regression lines. A full SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 license is required for network analysis, sankey diagrams (aka path analysis), word clouds (or anything text analytics), and decision trees. You still need to integrate SAS Visual Analytics with data, programs, processes, systems, and infrastructure still based on SAS 9.4. Other notable features   For a high-level comparison of SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 features to older releases as well as the 8.x SAS Viya-based releases, please consult this document.  Go to page 12 of the document “Visualization” section. There are some SAS Stored Process improvements User session persists for stored processes used in SAS® Visual Analytics reports Ability to print or distribute a SAS® Visual Analytics report that includes a stored process. Tips (i.e., how to transition)   Since SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 still runs on the SAS Metadata Server (and likewise is still managed through the SAS Management Console) like its predecessors, this install/config would be an upgrade-in-place or through promotion. A System Evaluation and Content Assessment tool has been created to scan a customer’s deployment for potential issues that might impede an upgrade-in-place, and is available on the SAS Downloads page for the benefit of all SAS customers and partners.  Please partner with SAS Tech Support to evaluate the results of this tool. If transitioning from SAS E/BI, the SAS Add-in for MS-Office can view OLAP cubes similar to how it was within the SAS Web OLAP Viewer. Official web browser support is documented here. Considerations (regarding some of the previous versions usage and content)   There are some differences in similar functionality between SAS Visual Analytics 7.4 and 7.5. SAS Stored Processes with prompts render differently within a report page in SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 compared to 7.4.  A possible workaround is documented here.  Integrating report objects within SAS Visual Analytics (e.g. click on a Bar Chart) to link and pass parameters to a prompted Stored Process have different steps in 7.4 (i.e., creating a link to an external URL automatically points to the SAS Stored Process Web Application and prompts) compared to 7.5 (i.e., you have to create a manual link to a URL and supply your SAS Stored Process Web Application path and associated prompts yourself). All SAS products integrating with SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 would also need to be upgraded to their comparable latest release on SAS 9.4 Maintenance 6 levels. If you’re transitioning to SAS Visual Analytics 7.5 from SAS E/BI, during the transitional period you can have both solutions co-exist as described (at a high level) in this document as well as (in more detail) in this document.   Conclusion   SAS Viya 3.5 is the latest technology offering available for customers.  Moving to SAS Viya 3.5 allows you to leverage a vast scope of improvements to the platform, security updates and new and enhanced capabilities across many applications which our customers have been asking for.   In line with market needs and customer demands to be ready for the cloud-driven future technology offerings, SAS is moving its development efforts to the next generation of SAS Viya by providing cloud-native support for the future. This is SAS’ primary focus of development in 2020 and beyond which will benefit its customers in adopting the latest technology in a CI/CD approach. With this focus, SAS will continue to provide necessary support on SAS Viya 3.5, addressing needs for existing capabilities; however, all new development will be based on new cloud-native architecture and applications based on top of it.  Our target is always to let the customer be on the latest and greatest version of the platform/applications that are currently available as production.               ... View more