Hi all, I could really use some help and appreciate the support in advance.
I want to point out that I am an end user and am an account manager; a large part of my job involves supporting clients w/ insightful analysis, which is why I use the Excel add-in. Frankly, our SAS admin tried getting us to use EG, but we found it difficult for non tech-savvy folks like us. The reason I am turning to the community is b/c I have to imagine there is a better solution out there that we (and our admin) might not be aware of or envisioning.
Here is the issue: we have a number of olap cubes and tables/data sets built from these cubes (I think that's how it works), which we access to do our analysis. However, since we are often on the road or working remotely, and the file is quite large, it is often not possible or extremely time consuming to connect to the db to run the analysis. Even when we are connected to the network, refreshing the data takes considerable time. Therefore, we have been saving the data to Excel and refreshing it periodically (couple times/month). However, as the data set continues to grow, not only does refreshing take more and more time, but our Excel file is becoming quite large.
There are a number of other issues we have going, but not necessary to expand on them here. What is important to know is that I am working w/ the dba to possibly build another table that will encompass only the data we need for the analysis we do; however, I believe this file will also grow to be quite large.
All that said, I am wondering if anyone out there has any suggestions as to how we can improve our processes to accomodate the needs/issues I have described?
One of the (perhaps moronic) thoughts I had was to use MS Access to store the data and then run Excel analysis from that location but I am not even sure this would help accomplish the goal and more significant, I have learned there is no SAS Access add-in.
Out of naivety (sp?), I may not have provided all of the info needed to help, or you may have specific questions I either overlooked or is foreign to me, so pls let me know if you need additional information and I will hunt it down.
I very much look forward to hearing back and am very appreciative!
Happy Holidays,
Evan