A better experience with SAS Studio
Customers going from SAS EG in 9.4 to SAS Studio on SAS Viya are hesitant to take the step into the new and unknown. A customer of mine had some inertia adopting SAS Studio (Version: Stable 2023.05) on SAS Viya 4 for various reasons (UI related, old habits and not knowing/using best practices). This led to an effort to put together some best practices, ‘do this/not that’ type of documentation for SAS Studio. Drawing on my own experience from helping customers migrate to SAS Viya I provided some suggestions but I knew there were things I didn’t know about. Thankfully I was able to connect with Samantha Dupont, a Distinguished User Experience Designer at SAS, who gave me some valuable advice that got the customer to a better place overall with using SAS Studio.
The primary issue reported by the customer was not having enough real estate on the screen to view logs and programs, followed by frequent time outs in SAS Studio.
Here are some simple solutions that we suggested that you might find useful.
1. If using SAS Studio on a browser, use full screen mode (F11).
Before: header, address bar, favorites etc. taking a lot of the real estate.
After: Eliminated all the unwanted stuff from the window.
2. Collapse the left pane:
While this is a simple trick, to my surprise a lot of the users hadn’t thought of using it to increase their real estate.
Before:
After:
3. Change the program tab layout
Before:
To change the layout:
Click on the 3 vertical dots on the top right side of the screen.
Select Tab Layout and select single.
After: You get the entire screen for log or program or results which are in their own tab. This gives a lot more real estate for large/ wide programs.
Program view:
Log view:
4. Default output tab: If you are anything like me, you want to see the log window after submitting a program and not the output window. And there is a setting for that!
Here is how you do that.
Click on Options -> Preferences.
In the 'General' section, select log in the display options:
Scroll down on the 'Code and Log' section and select the tab display option you prefer and click Save.
5. Did you say ‘my own browser tab’?
You can open the logs, programs, summary log and output in their own browser tab if you want even more space to look at it.
How: Click on the 3 vertical dots at the top right side of the screen. Select ‘Open in a browser tab’ and select the item that you want to view
Before:
After:
SAS Studio can be used as something called the Progressive Web App (PWA) which provides some added benefits.
These are the benefits per the documentation link provided above:
- Application persistence – When you access SAS Studio as a PWA from the Windows Start menu, your session will never time out. When you access SAS Studio through a web browser, your session will time out after a period of inactivity and you will be logged out. For more information, see Set a Time-Out for PWA.
- Performance – When installed as a PWA, SAS Studio typically starts faster than when it is accessed in the browser.
- Desktop experience – Installing SAS Studio as a PWA confers all the benefits of a traditional installation. You can launch SAS Studio from the Start menu or Taskbar, and you do not need to sort through countless tabs to find the correct instances of SAS Studio.
- Renaming – You can rename each PWA instance to quickly access different environments such as development, test, or production servers.
The PWA icon for my go-to viya environment is pinned to my taskbar.
The look and feel of the PWA is the same as SAS Studio on the browser but it definitely feels a lighter and faster than SAS Studio on the browser. This was also confirmed by the customer whom I was helping.
It automatically comes with the full screen without the address bar, favorite bar etc.
Info on installing the PWA for your site is available here.
This has by far been the favorite hack for my customer and they have reported better performance with PWA.
Hope your SAS Studio experience improves with these few tips and tricks!
You can view 2 tables in SAS Studio at a time.
Here is how I do it.
In my current view, I have 2 tables open, one called sashelp.air and the another called sashelp.airlines which is the one I'm viewing:
Right click on the table name and select 'New Horizontal Tab Group'.
This will move the sashelp.airline table to the bottom as shown here.
Then, simply select the sashelp.air table in the top, to view both tables at once.
I hope this helps.
Thank you!
