How Does SAS® Viya® Integrate with My Favorite Microsoft Products?
You will learn how to:
- Use SAS for Microsoft 365 in Outlook to easily access SAS Visual Analytics reports and embed analytic insights directly into your Outlook communications.
- Augment your Excel worksheets and PowerPoint presentations with embedded SAS content to display key insights.
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
Are there limits to # of rows/columns that can be read into an Excel sheet (short of Excel's internal limits)?
100,000 rows or 10 million cells is the data limit that can be inserted into a worksheet.
When you share a document with embedded data, will the end users have to have access to SAS to be able to interact with the data/visualization?
If you want them to have the ability to update/refresh, they will need connection to the back end Viya 4.x server. Otherwise, no.
Is your SAS dataset stored on a Viya server or a separate attached storage device?
It depends. The data is referenced on the back-end SAS Viya 4.x server ala SAS/Access, so depending how that was set-up (In-Database, In-Memory, converted to SAS data set, ODBC, etc.).
For 9.4 days, AMO with Outlook gave a lot of issues (exchange, etc.), I take it that this is not the case for Viya?
Not sure what specific issues you experienced with SAS AMO for SAS 9.4/Viya 3.x but this webinar is about SAS for MS365 ala Viya4, which should be an improvement over previous AMO.
I'd like to propose a use case. User needs to update a table and (automatically) start a job that updates lots of other data. Can this be done in Excel now or soon?
The SAS code editor in Excel will be released in the next few months, and support for SAS jobs (SAS 9.x stored process replacement) is also on the roadmap.
Can you also append data to a SAS Viya table, or can we only create a new table/replace existing data?
Read and create only currently. No update-in-place of SAS or Viya CAS tables are not currently supported yet. So, you can’t do things like update existing Viya CAS tables including adding new rows and updating existing values. It's on the product roadmap.
Is it possible to start SAS programs or flows from an Excel session?
Not currently, but the SAS code editor in Excel will be released in the next few months!
What version of Viya is this available in?
SAS for MS 365 requires Viya 4.x.
To make this work, what files are required to be installed? Is this just a Microsoft file? I am on SAS Viya 4.
SAS for Microsoft 365 is included in a Visual Analytics license. A SAS administrator needs to customize an XML manifest file for their specific SAS Viya environment, then deploy these manifest files in Microsoft 365. Updates to a few environmental properties in the SAS Viya environment are also required to ensure th... For most customers, the add-in would be admin managed so users with access to SAS for Microsoft 365 will see the new SAS tab on their Excel, Outlook, or PPT ribbon immediately.
If my employer hasn't installed MS 365 yet and only MS office 2019 is available, would the SAS add-in still be deployable?
The older SAS Add-in for MS-Office supports the older Office like 2021/2019 ala SAS 9.4 / Viya 3.x. What was covered today is for MS Office 365 ala SAS Viya 4.x.
Can you automate the process, so it does not have to be done manually? Essentially, an automatic report update on a certain date?
The scheduling capabilities that were in the older SAS 9.4 / Viya 3.x Add-in to MS-Office will eventually be added as a capability to this Viya 4.x version.
What level of interaction is possible between SAS VA (on Viya) and Excel (as in CRUD possibilities)?
Using the Upload Data capability, you can load your Excel worksheets to SAS (as well as delete them). Update capabilities are on the roadmap.
Are we able to do all of this with Office if we only have Enterprise Guide with Microsoft Office Add-in or is this only possible if we have SAS Viya Visual Analytics?
This is covering the SAS for MS 365 which supports Viya 4.x. The older SAS Add-in for MS-Office, which supports SAS 9.4 or Viya 3.x, has comparable functionality. To integrate reports/visualizations, either would require SAS Visual Analytics.
If we only have visualizations with no data tables (due to Excel data limits), can we bring in summaries that are based on analysis of 10 million rows, for example?
Whatever you build in SAS Visual Analytics on the back-end SAS Viya 4.x server (in terms of reports or visualizations or data views), that determines what's brought into SAS for MS-365. Though, if the report contains many visuals, the SAS for MS-365 users can decide to only bring down portions.
What can we expect from SAS for Microsoft 365 in the future?
In the very near future, you will see that we'll soon be releasing the programming environment in Excel. Beyond that, we are looking at integrating with Word, Teams, and then additional capabilities for Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. But we're always looking for feedback to inform us on demand for features and functionality. If you have any feature requests, I would love to hear your wish list.
How would I go about setting up SAS for Microsoft 365 in my desktop Excel application? What are the SAS or Microsoft requirements?
The first thing is a SAS administrator would need to customize an XML manifest file for their specific Viya environment and then they would deploy that manifest file in Microsoft 365. Once they do that, they make a few updates to a few environmental properties in your staff Viya environment, which are necessary to ensure that staff from Microsoft runs smoothly. But once those two things happen, customers would often just see SAS added to their Excel ribbon, so at that point they can start using. SAS and Excel immediately. They don't need to do a desktop installation.
Can you embed formatted data in PowerPoint (a dataset in multiple slides)? It's an unusual request, but it has come up in the past.
Currently, we support embedding report content in PowerPoint. Not data sets like what you saw in Excel. But if that is something there's a lot of demand for, we would definitely be interested in adding that in the future.
How about greater integration with MS SQL Server?
Currently, there are no plans to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server in SAS from Microsoft 365, but we could absolutely investigate that and add it to the road map if there is enough demand for it.
Can I insert content into Excel and then send it over into PowerPoint?
No, they're separate applications, so you would insert content in those office documents separately. In the demo, you saw how I launched the SAS pane individually in Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel. That's what you would have to do here as well.
What timeframe are we looking at for SharePoint integration?
It's hard to gauge a specific time frame, but I would say in the next 12 to 18 months for SharePoint integration.
What is the future direction of scheduling capabilities for SAS for Microsoft 365?
One of the things that is high priority for us is to provide support for SAS jobs, which is code that you would like to run ad hoc or schedule. That's currently not something that we support, but it is on the road map and we're working towards that.
Can all this be automated without opening Microsoft applications or SAS via scheduled tasks or batch scheduling?
So currently we do not support automated updates or automated scheduling without opening your document in that Microsoft application, but we have put this on the road map because I've heard this request for a few other customers as well. We will need to research what is technically feasible with the new Office add-in technology SAS for Microsoft 365 uses.
Recommended Resources
SAS Tutorial: SAS for Microsoft 365 in Excel
SAS Tutorial: Working with SAS Visual Analytics Reports in Microsoft Excel
SAS Tutorial: Working with SAS Data in Microsoft Excel
Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.
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