SAS Studio - DDE and System Commands

[Reeza]

If you have an enterprise installation of SAS, and are use SAS Studio as your interface will you lose access to system commands with the local machine?

I'm assuming DDE wouldn't work as well, but if someone could confirm that would be appreciated.

Thanks.

PS. Yes I know DDE is old technology 

[LinusH · Accepted solution]

Since SAS Studio (to my knowledge) is 100% web based, I can't see how interaction with local programs can possibly work.

What do you want to achieve?

[Reeza]

We have a bunch of reports that rely on exporting analyzed data to Excel and then executing a bunch of excel macros and vbs.  

Excel Macros - used to export Excel report to PDF

VBS used to combine PDF's from various processes.

We can probably script it all in another language, but it was nice being able to control the full analysis from SAS. 

[LinusH]

Only you know what your XL macro/vbs stuff does. My personal opinion is that reporting/analyze logic is better maintained in a centralized BI infrastructure (like SAS ).

As you there are many options to create/modfy Excel spreadsheets, and produce pdf files. Whether it's possible/worth the effort to convert the existing logic, I have no idea.

[RW9]

I would agree with @LinusH.  

There is however another way of doing it.  Currently your pushing data from SAS, and then pushing commands out from SAS.  You could reverse the second half of this.  Push the data out from SAS as plain CSV.  Then in your Office documents, pull that data in.  Should be a pretty straight forward, OnOpen() macro function to pull in CSV data to a spreadsheet, or you could have it as a macro on a separate Excel file.

I would question why you are going from SAS to Excel to VBA to PDF?  Sounds a bit "around the houses" type approach.  A quick analysis of the complete process should yield a far better more robust system. 

[Reeza]

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@RW9 wrote:

A quick analysis of the complete process should yield a far better more robust system. 

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It wouldn't be quick, but thanks for the suggestion.