Is SAS Visual Analytics a good replacement to create publication ready reports like MS Access

[mpirritano]

Using MS Access we have created really pretty publication ready reports that we then export with specific filenames and send to external customers. We are being told not to use MS Access and we're looking for an alternative. We're looking into Power BI, Rmarkdown, and SAS Visual Analytics. We need a tool that can do the following: enable us to create queries from multiple tables and use multiple data sources to populate the report; export dynamic paginated reports with assigned filenames. If you have experience with MS Access you know what I'm looking for. We were using vba to customize our reports.

Everyone we go to recommends Tableau - but Tableau isn't really designed to make reports to be exported to pdf en masse. We often need to create 50 or 100 reports. We do have some python code that can export pdfs from Tableau, but it's not ideal, and i'm not sure how that would work if we want to assign different information on different pages. Feels like we're forcing Tableau to do something it's not designed to do.

Please ask me any questions if this needs clarification. Any help is much appreciated!

thansk

matt

[SASKiwi]

I suggest you look through the Visual Analytics Gallery to get a better idea of what it is used for. IMHO it is more of a dashboarding tool rather than a custom reporting one. The emphasis is more on visually exploring data, not generating publication reports.

[Patrick]

My 5 cents:
Both Tableau and SAS VA are great for interactive reports/dash boards. Both products allow for export of such reports to pdf and both products have interfaces that allow for automation
(Tableau: CLI, SAS VA: REST API, SAS VA SDK). 

Not sure about Tableau but with SAS you could of course also use SAS/Graph to create such reports. Robert Allison's SAS Graphics Examples

To select what's right for you, I'd also consider migration effort (upskilling included), cost and risk as well as any company policies (like: is there a defined enterprise tool to be used for external reporting, what products are easily available to you/already licensed and installed). 

Assuming you're working for a bigger organisation, I'd also try to figure out what other departments use for external reporting and what their experiences are. 

...and of course there are also other tools like R and Python that allow for pretty pdf reports.