Watch this Ask the Expert session to learn how to modernize information delivery across your organization.
Watch the Webinar
You will learn:
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The experience of accessing SAS content through Microsoft 365.
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What it’s like to create new content in SAS® Viya®.
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About the wider array of analytics and procedures not available in SAS®9.
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The migration process for SAS®9 content included in Microsoft Office documents.
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
You showed the other Microsoft Office tools, does SAS work with PowerBI?
SAS does not directly interact with PowerBI, though you can include content from SAS Visual Analytics and access SAS data from PowerBI.
SAS Viya is an enterprise solution - that won't work for our environment - SAS has announced they will be keeping SAS 9 alive, will any of this be moving to SAS 9 or will this only be available in SAS Viya?
SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office (AMO) is the SAS 9 equivalent to SAS for Microsoft 365 in SAS Viya. AMO has been around for many years and is a very mature offering, and you can leverage it if you want to continue working with SAS 9.
Excel can manage up to 1,048K lines. What occurs when loading large files? Is it possible to surpass this limitation?
When I loaded that CARS table, and I chose not to pull the entire table, I just got 100 lines. One of the things that I didn't show you is that in the Add-in, you can paginate through the data so you can get the next 100 lines or whatever number of lines you chose to pull when you first added that table into the Excel worksheet. So, you can paginate, you can go back and forth through all the data if you want. That's how we normally deal with that limitation that Excel has. You can bring all the data at once, which is not recommended if the table is too big, or you can bring just a chunk. In either case, remember that the table is connected to the back-end server, so you can still have access to the entire content if you want.
Can you access open-source code through the add-in for Microsoft 365?
I briefly demoed it in the part with Python. Let's say the SAS compute server on Viya is able to connect to open-source environments. As I showed you in the demo, you can access, for example, any Python or you can run any Python code from within Excel here via the source code or the SAS programs window.
We are seeing here two questions that are quite similar. One says that their organization does not allow Microsoft 365 tools installed locally in their laptops, and the other says the opposite: no cloud applications allowed. The question is: are we still able to leverage the SAS content considering those limitations?
I wouldn't say it's really a limitation because probably this question came before I mentioned that with the SAS for Microsoft 365, you can deploy the Add-in not only into the web interfaces but also into the desktop interfaces. You can use the Add-in embedded in MS Office desktop clients or in their web-based / cloud-based versions. If you have limitations on one side or the other, you are now able to choose the one that works better for you. And again, this is one of the differences between the old Add-in and the new Add-in. The old Add-in only had one option because of the technology used behind the scenes. The The old Add-in could only be used with the desktop clients and that was limited to Windows machines only. And now you are open to other options.
We currently license Analytics Pro, and it comes with two access engines. Could you clarify if the access engines will still be available?
The licensing of the access engines was limited in the SAS 9 platform. But if you move to Viya, you get all available access engines automatically. There might be in some cases, but that's a rare number where you have an access engine that's only available on SAS 9, maybe 2. The database is no longer available. But in general, all the access engines available in SAS 9 are also available on the Viya platform and you do not have to license them separately.
Recommended Resources
Please see additional resources in the attached slide deck.
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