Exporting SAS Visual Analytics Report in .pptx file format

[Quantopic]

Hello SAS users,

I need for exporting a SAS visual analytics Report into a MS Power Point file.

Anyone of you can provide some advices/hint in order to be able to do that?

Thanks all for the help!

[MichelleHomes]

You can only export a SAS Visual Analytics report to a .pdf file. However, if you have SAS Office Analytics licensed you can create Powerpoints from SAS Visual Analytics reports. Have a look at the following paper for information

http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings16/SAS3360-2016.pdf

Kind Regards,

Michelle

[itchyeyeballs]

To second Michelles suggestion,

we use the Office Analytics to embed reports into MS Word and Powerpoint, its a really good tool and makes life much easier for report designers and end users, it's actually better than Microsofts own integreation between Power BI and Office.

I think there are two versions of the tool though so make sure you get the right one.

[MichelleHomes]

Hi @itchyeyeballs,

I'm curious to your comment "it's actually better than Microsofts own integreation between Power BI and Office." Could you please expand on your experiences and why it is better?

Thanks,

Michelle

[itchyeyeballs · Accepted solution]

No problem,

Main points: 

• End users don’t need specific versions of MS Office - Trying to get everyone in a large organsiation on the right version of Office (and associated service packs) in order to share Power BI content is a nightmare.
• Reports are interactive - users with the SAS analytics plugin can filter and drill into reports. The MS functionality just produces static images in PowerPoint (and its still only a preview feature). MS have confirmed they have no plans to develop this either so users need to be linked across to the web reports.
• Reports can easily be shared with users that don’t have the SAS analytics plugin
• SAS is on prem, Power BI is still cloud only (as far as I'm aware) and you need a licence for every user that you want to share reports with.
• Excel Power BI functionality is widely regarded to be extremely buggy at the moment, 2016 update made things worse. SAS plugin is more stable (although doesn't play nicely if you use it along side Power BI in Excel)

There are more but I stopped comparing once I got the SAS add in up and running as the points above are key for us. 

The one feature that I have found to be better in the MS offering is the ability to create a full data model in Power BI then link it directly to Excel, it means you can create a very complex model with lots of tables and measures and re-use across multiple Excel workbooks and PBI reports. SAS doesn’t do data models in VA at all.

[Quantopic]

Hi guys,

thanks for the quick replies.

Could you suggest me how can I check whether I have or not the license for Office Analytics?

Thanks again!

[itchyeyeballs]

Open Base SAS on the server and type

PROC SETINIT;
RUN ;

you should see something like

---SAS Add-in for Microsoft Excel
expiry date
---SAS Add-in for Microsoft Outlook
expiry date
---SAS Add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint
expiry date
---SAS Add-in for Microsoft Word

[Quantopic]

Thanks !!

[rsleslie]

When you say "reports are interactive", that's from the VA side.  Once you Insert Report (or Insert Selection) to PPT the VA report is static.  One can only change the PPT by opening the VA report.  Correct?

Do you know of a way to burst reports to PPT?  That is, I have one VA report with data for multiple clients.  I want to create a separate PPT deck foreach person showing their client's data only.

Scott

[itchyeyeballs]

Reports have simiar level of interaction as the normal web viwer i.e. end users can filter & refresh data

Row level security on the underlying LASR tables may give you what you need in terms of personalising the reports, will depend on how your data is structured and exactly what you need to achieve, should be possible to have a single set of VA reports and 1 Powerpoint template though.

[rsleslie]

Thanks. This is helpful