Enterprise Guide Productivity Gains?

[Quentin]

Hi,

Agree with Tom's summary.  I'm actually working on a "EG for programmers" blog post.   I have been programming in SAS for many years, and have been using EG a bit the past year (prompted by starting to learn BI / stored processes, which I'm sure feels like a nicer reason to start learning EG than if someone had ripped DM SAS out of my hands).

One benefit for experienced SAS programmers I would add is the ability to use  EG as an editor for code that is sitting on our linux server.  I know lots of folks love their *nix editors, but I never really learned one.  So in the past when I wanted to edit a .sas file sitting on linux server, I would often end up either FTPing the file or (if we had Samba set up), opening it in PC SAS to develop, then log in to the server to batch submit the finished code.

With EG, I can directly edit and submit my .sas files that are on the server, which feels like a big help.  For some projects I end up with an EG project file with links pointing to .sas files on the server, .html files on the server, etc etc.

--Q.

[ballardw]

I found Tom's outline useful even though I don't use EG. I had seen several "how to do xx" posts on the forum that didn't explicitly mention using an EG environment until several posts into the discussion and wondered why the original poster hadn't found the, sometimes extremely simple, solutions. So I opened an EG session (installed just seldom used) and found that the content of the online help was often less than half that of the Base SAS help. That did not increase my desire to deal with EG.

[ChrisHemedinger]

If you're referring to the syntax help for the SAS language, you can always have local access to that if you install the SAS OnlineDoc for Windows, which should be part of your SAS installation package.  EG doesn't bundle it in the client install because it is quite large, and it would duplicate what many people already have installed and available in the SAS OnlineDoc.  But you can install it separately.

In EG 5.1, there is easy access to reference help right from the program editor.  For example, when I have the cursor over the ORDER option in PROC FREQ, I see this:

If I need more details, the blue underlined text pieces are links to the SAS OnlineDoc on support.sas.com.

Chris