Hi. I am wondering if someone can help me with my musing on concepts around SAS PCFiles server, and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office.
Users are finding the SAS Add-in in Excel is a bit unstable in our environment (Excel crashes, data disappears etc.), and someone had been on a course and was told a PCFiles server would help. Our environment is SAS EG7.1, AMO 7.1, Office 2013 on mainly Win10 client machines, going to a SAS 9.3 (TS1M2) server on WinServer 2012 R2. There is no "local" server on users' machines.
On the SAS server we have 64-bit SAS, and 64-bit Excel. So my thinking is when using SAS EG to create Excel files, a PCFiles service would be of no benefit.
However on the users' machines the Excel and the SAS Add-In are 32-bit.
If they use the SAS Add-in to produce some data via say a SAS stored process, I am thinking they are not really creating a spreadsheet, but rather populating some cells in an existing spreadsheet - so I am thinking the 64/32-bit tension is irrelevant, or am I horribly wrong in my thinking.
And would a SAS PC Files Server magically fix things? It doesn’t seem right to put one on the SAS server for that scenario, (it would default to a 64-bit install), but would putting a 32-bit rendition on a client machine help?
Your thoughts would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Eric.
The PC Files Server is not controlled by the client (you can't access it from Excel like the Add-In), but by the SAS process that uses it remotely.
It sits on a machine that has Office installed and must have the same bitness as the Office installation. SAS bitness plays no role in this, as the network interface of the PC Files Server is independent from that.
Your best bet would be to migrate to SAS 9.4 ASAP, because then you would have the capability to write xlsx files directly from the SAS process.
When you have a centralized desktop server (ie Citrix), using the PC Files Server will become tricky, as it is designed with a single user / single PC scenario in mind. On option would be to set up a file server that has the PC Files Server running and can be mounted in your users desktop sessions on the desktop server. But it still would not give you the functionality of the Add-In.
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