Excel Functionality in SAS WRS

[saspert]

Hi,
We are in the process of designing IMAPS and reports for business users who are currently using them by way of pivots and VBA macro in Excel. They want the excel cells in the reports so that when they select multiple cells - they can see the sum of the selected cells.
Is that possible in WRS? I know the crosstab report can show the final numbers but what about giving them the Excel feel-and-look?

Thanks,
Raj.

[Jenn2]

Raj,
What version do you have?

[saspert]

Jenn,
We have SAS 9.1 (and WRS 4.1 I think).

Thanks,
Raj.

[Jenn2]

Hello Raj,
currently, that functionality is not available in v4.2 or v3.1 but it is something that has been discussed in development. I am hoping some expert will provide you a "work around" to the problem.

Can you tell me more about your request to sum a select group of table cells? How often do you need that functionality? How many cells do you typically need to sum at once?

Jenn2

[AngelaHall]

Of course I don't know what the business requirements are to make these web enabled. But if the users are looking for excel like look & feel, would it make sense to use different SAS client tools altogether?

My recommendation would be to take a look at Add-in to Microsoft Office instead of WRS, as it allows users to interact with SAS data and use SAS tasks within Pivot or flat tables. Especially if they are already extremely comfortable with that device they can get training on the additional SAS functionality extremely quickly & not loose any functionality that they currently enjoy.

You can also create more 'custom' reports that are run in Add-in to MS Office using the SAS Stored Process functionality. The results are the displayed in the Excel window for the user to interact with in just the fashion you requested.

~ Angela Hall
http://sas-bi.blogspot.com

[saspert]

Angela,
Thanks for your feedback. Your feedback was what I initially thought as a possible course of action for this select group of users. We will probably take some more time to evaluate whether we can support their Entire reporting process. But, I will give an idea as to what I am looking for below.
Jenn,
Thanks for the resposne. Here is the functionality that we need to replicate. Currently, the Excel spreadsheet has multiple pivots and lookup tables built in it. It also has several VBA macros transferring data between Excel and a DB2 database through ODBC sources.
2 tabs in the Excel file actually show the end reports. These link to other pivots and macros though VBA code. One column in this tab also serves as a input form for the VBA macro to read and upload to the DB2 database. The users say it is very convenient to read the report, sum data (sum several cells or do simple math) and also feed data to the database engine in the background.

We are thinking we could provide some of this functionality through MS AddIn. I will probably add more details in this thread as we start developing the code.