Hi Cathy
There is definitely a SAS AMO for PowerPoint. Have a look at the product docu:
http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/addin/index.html
I believe SAS AMO is a great way to empower end-users to do their own analysis and create some adhoc-reports without the need of knowing a lot about programming.
For what you want to achieve I think that you risk a lot of pain when you give ppt slides to the end-user for regular reporting. It's less about the data source. I agree that you can protect it by granting read access only.
But what are you going to do about the ppt slides which are under the end-users control? How do you avoid that your end-users start changing the slides until they are no more functional - and then start "screaming" that "the system" is faulty.
I promise you that this is going to happen in one way or the other and that you will have to intervene and fix slides month after month.
Also: Because a lot of end-users won't understand the difference between slides with a "data link" and their own "static" slides you risk a "inflation" of change request. You will get little understanding that some of the requested and so simple looking changes would be a pain to realise.
If your end-users want access to the underlying data to produce their own adhoc-reports: Give them either access via SAS AMO (then best done in Excel) or produce monthly data extracts for them (i.e. csv files).
There is another issue with SAS AMO (and also any VBA solution): All this stuff depends on the MS Office version and it wouldn't be the first time that some functionality doesn't work properly anymore after MS Office got updated.
The "bad" thing about push and pdf: Unless you've got experience with SAS/Graph then creating reasonable graphs with SAS could become quite a challenge and is for sure more difficult than creating the same graphs in MS Office.
HTH
Patrick