topic Re: Feature request: Display variables' names in a tab in SAS Programming

Feature request: Display variables' names in a tab

ammarhm — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 00:15:32 GMT

I have been working with SAS now about 2 years. Coming from other softwares like SATA, I loved the flexibility of SAS code, the diversity and the power.

However, many things could be imrpoved, especially when it comes to the way SAS uses/displayes the data variables/table columns.

STATA had a great feature: It displayed the names of the data variables / tables columns headers in a tab so that you dont need to remeber them or get en error when you misspell them. Double clicking the variable name in STATA inserts it into the line code directly, which is very handy

This becomes very frustrating in SAS when you are working on multiple projects, each of which might have several tables and tens of variables.

SAS enterprise with its Intellisense/auto-complete, but nevertheless the feature dosent always solve the issue (still needs improving)

I am wondering whether there is a way in SAS to get the variables displayed like STATA or is it a feature that should be requested to make life easier when using SAS?

SAS Studio (online version) dose have this feature by the way... though you cant double click it to insert into code text like STATA

Kind regards

Re: Feature request: Display variables' names in a tab

Reeza — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 02:26:07 GMT

Suggestions/ideas for improvement should be posted to the ideas section and then other users can comment and vote.

SAS devs do pay attention to the ideas suggested.

https://communities.sas.com/t5/SASware-Ballot-Ideas/idb-p/sas_ideas

Re: Feature request: Display variables' names in a tab

ammarhm — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 02:36:11 GMT

Thanks Reza, Done!

Re: Feature request: Display variables' names in a tab

ballardw — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 20:21:19 GMT

Just in case people find this message instead of the "feature request"

In BASE SAS table viewer the column heading can change from label to variable name using the view menu. If you want to change the default behavior make the SAS explorer the active window, go to the tools menu, select options, Explorer. go to the Members tab, select TABLE and then the entry for &Open. Edit the command to look something like:

VIEWTABLE %8b."%s".DATA colheading=name

I have a number of other options set but this will open tables with the colheading option on.

You will likely want to do the same for VIEWS. Search the online help for VIEWTABLE syntax to find commands that might be useful.