What's New from SAS for Microsoft 365

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A new year brings new goals and a sharper focus on the future—but it’s also the perfect time to look back at what we achieved last year. In 2025, we rolled out several updates to SAS for Microsoft 365. This post walks through those enhancements, including improvements to SAS Viya Jobs, refreshed themes and banners, and the ability to open more rows of data in an Excel worksheet.

 

SAS Viya Jobs Now Available in Microsoft Word

The SAS Viya 2025.12 stable release expands SAS for Microsoft 365 by enabling direct access to SAS Viya Jobs from Microsoft Word. To access a job, simply go to the Reports tab of the SAS Pane and open the job, which will appear in the Results tab. For example, here I have a SAS Viya Job called Cars Selection that asks for a vehicle make and produces a report of vehicles from the SASHELP.CARS table including details such as model, drive train, and MSRP.

I selected Acura as my vehicle make and ran the job. From here, I insert the resulting table and using Word’s built-in functionality, I can edit the table directly within the document. For example, here I’ve bolded the title and column headers.

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Open a SAS Viya Job Multiple Times

An exciting update that came with the SAS Viya 2025.08 release was the ability to open a SAS Viya Job multiple times within SAS for Microsoft 365. This allows users to include the results of several different prompt values in the same workbook or document.

For example, say I want to include an additional table of Honda vehicles in my Word document. If I simply change the prompt from Acura to Honda, I can only update the inserted table in the document, not add a second table.

Instead, I can reopen the Cars Selection job from the Reports tab. Notice SAS for Microsoft 365 appends the number (1) to the job name, and the job is open twice in the SAS Pane.

I change the prompt value to Honda and run the job. Now we can insert the Honda table underneath the Acura table in the document and bold the title and column headers with Word.

 

End-of-Life Notice: Task (XML) Prompts

In earlier releases of SAS Studio, SAS jobs used XML prompts, also known as task prompts. These task (XML) prompts reached end of life in the SAS Studio 2025.06 stable release and are no longer supported in SAS Studio.

XML-based prompts can be converted to step (JSON) prompts using SAS Studio. For more information, see SAS Help Center: Working with Prompts in SAS Jobs.

 

Other Updates

In addition to the updates to SAS Viya Jobs, SAS for Microsoft 365 also introduced several other important enhancements in 2025:

• Bigger Data : Since the SAS Viya 2025.09 stable release, users can open up to 1,048,575 rows in an Excel worksheet. This value is the maximum number of rows allowed by Excel. If you data contains more rows, a warning is displayed. In previous releases, SAS for Microsoft 365 limited you to 100,000 rows.
• Enhanced Themes: The SAS Viya themes have been refreshed and include enhancements such as improved focus indicator visibility for keyboard users, and updated Dark and High Contrast themes. For more information on theme updates, visit SAS Help Center: 2025.06 (June 2025)
• New SAS Banner: A new blue banner has been added to the SAS pane in Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook as of the SAS Viya 2025.10 (October 2025) stable release. Click the avatar to change your settings, to open your connection to the SAS Viya platform, or to sign out.

 

Conclusion

The 2025 updates to SAS for Microsoft 365 enhance integration, usability, and flexibility across Microsoft apps. With improved SAS Viya Jobs support, larger Excel data limits, and refreshed themes, these enhancements help you work more efficiently and get more value from your analytics.

For more information on SAS for Microsoft 365, visit the following:

• What's new in SAS for Microsoft 365: SAS Help Center: What’s New in SAS for Microsoft 365
• General Information: SAS for Microsoft 365 | SAS Support
• SAS Viya Jobs in SAS for Microsoft 365: Getting the Job Done: Connecting SAS Viya Jobs with SAS for Microsoft 365
• Other posts related to SAS for Microsoft 365: SAS for Microsoft 365 Blog List

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