SAS Universal Viewer is Unusable

[mglogan]

Hi,

This is my first time using the new SAS Universal Viewer at a new company, and it seems extremely inferior to the previous SAS System Viewer.

My previous company, reverted back to SAS System Viewer (using some tweaks) because they mentioned this wasn't as useful.

Am I missing something?

It is painfully slow opening SAS data files.

I am unable to copy any values from the tables.

Is there a way to quickly view variable attributes?

Is there a way to quickly filter without having to select drop down options (i.e. type in a where clause for example)?

I just downloaded the user's guide, so I will skim through it, but I feel like this is a bit much; it should be straight foreword. 

Thank you! 

[ballardw]

Slow to open brings up questions of how big (number of observations and variables) and where the files are located. If you have to pull the data from any remote storage then network speeds can have significant effects on anything and larger files take longer to get regardless of location.

Which specific version of the viewer are you using? On the main menu click on the Help then the About sub-menu to find the specific version.

[mglogan]

Company is currently running version 1.4.
Our file sizes are not large, some with less than 100 observations.

[SASKiwi]

According to the Universal Viewer download page, the latest version is 1.5 and the history of versions goes back to 92.15 back in Jun 2008! So it looks like you are comparing V1.5 with the SAS System Viewer which probably predates Jun 2008 and worked with SAS 9.2 or earlier. Doesn't sound like you are comparing apples with apples. I also see this on the download page:

Note:
The Software is provided as a convenience. Limited or no technical support is provided for the Software.

That suggests to me that the viewer has not received a lot of attention lately and is pretty much a legacy product.

[mglogan]

Sorry, my point is that the SAS System Viewer is the older implementation and it is in fact better than the current SAS Universal Viewer.

[SASKiwi · Accepted solution]

@mglogan - Yes I got that. My point is that the Universal Viewer replacement is not being fully supported which suggests to me that it is pretty much in "maintenance mode" with little effort to keep it up to date so the symptoms you are seeing are not so surprising.

It is worth bearing in mind that SAS's development efforts are now concentrated on Viya SAS's new fully cloud-enabled technology and customers are being encouraged to migrate. The Universal Viewer is firmly tied to SAS 9 legacy technology so won't be of any use on Viya.  

[mglogan]

Ahh got it. That makes sense.

Thank you for clarifying.
Guess we need to switch to Viya...