SAS Visual Analytics: A look at the new Expression Editor (Part 1)

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The new Expression Editor was first introduced in Stable 2023.06 (June 2023) and will be made available in the LTS 2023.10 (November 2023) release. There are some noticeable changes and I wanted to point out how to use some of the new features.

The quote from Paul Cezanne, "It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas" can resonate when you first look at the new expression editor. This can be especially true if you don’t want to start typing syntax! But don’t worry, as soon as you start to click in the editor, you’ll find your fears put to ease.

In Part 1 of this series, I will focus only on point-and-click instructions for building expressions. Part 2 of this series will demonstrate the coding features.

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Subtraction Expression

Let’s first look at building a simple expression. The only thing you’ll need to do is point, click, and place your cursor in the second argument position. In less than ten steps, you can build this subtraction expression.

The key take aways from this example are:

• Single click to add operators, functions, or data items to the expression editor.
• Place your cursor at the position you want to add a new operator, function, or data item.
• Type in the filter at the top to narrow down selections.

IF... ELSE with In Condition Expression

This is a commonly used expression in most reports I build, usually to build a flag indicator to define Display Rules. Let’s take a look at how to build this using the new expression editor.

The key take aways from this example are:

• Some functions have an expression builder wizard.
• To get back to the expression builder wizard, right-click anywhere inside the expression then select Edit.

Ratio with Sum numerator and AggregateTable denominator Expression

This last expression I want to build comes from the article: SAS Visual Analytics Report Example: Percent of Total – For All, For Rows, and For Columns.

The need to find a column’s percent of total has been popular recently, so let’s take a look how we would build this using the new expression editor. Feel free to read the entire article, but here are the expressions we will need to build using the new expression editor.

And here is my screenshot of the solution using the previous expression editor.

Here is a screenshot of the solution using the new expression editor.

Here’s the demonstration:

The key take away from this example is:

• You can build out your expression structure then go back and assign data roles, aggregations, etc.

Conclusion

I hope that you are now less weary about using the new Expression Editor. There are lots of new features I haven’t covered yet, but I will cover the coding using inline help and code completion for the Part 2 article.

When using point-and-click for the expression editor, here’s a summary of the things to keep in mind:

• Single click to add operators, functions, or data items to the expression editor.
• Place your cursor at the position you want to add a new operator, function, or data item.
• Type in the filter at the top to narrow down selections.
• Some functions have an expression builder wizard.
• To get back to the expression builder wizard, right-click anywhere inside the expression then select Edit.
• You can build out your expression structure then go back and assign data roles, aggregations, etc.

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