This article was rewritten Feb 20th 2023 to reflect some product name changes, to update screen captures, and to accurately reflect the latest SAS Help Center enhancements.
I am part of the team that writes the documentation for SAS. I wanted to give you a few useful tips for getting the most out of the documentation.
Where to find the documentation
This page provides links to the most popular SAS documentation and a mechanism for searching. Of course, you can access the documentation from the software. The link normally looks something like this:
Entering the SAS Help Center from the software has a couple of advantages:
You always come to the appropriate version of the software.
Your entry point is a carefully crafted landing page that will guide you as to the scope and content of the documentation that you have loaded.
Searching
OK, so you’re in the documentation—what now? Those tables of contents can be long. How are you going to find what you need?
One recommendation is to use the Search function. Let’s use the 2022.09 SAS Viya Platform Administration Guide as an example. If you need information about backups, enter “backup” in the search bar.
You should get 113 results. Here is a partial listing of the results (for this discussion, I have added a few labels in red):
Let’s break down the search hits (A). They are sorted by relevance and represented by the topic title (for example, Backup and Restore: Perform an Ad Hoc Backup), followed by the specific document that contains this search hit. Note that almost all SAS documentation is viewed as collections of more granular documents. In this case, the first few hits are all from the Backup and Restore guide.
But let’s imagine you are trying to perform a migration and want to know how to backup as part of the migration process. This is where the filter area (B) can help you. The filter lists all the guides that make up this collection. Scroll down and select Full-System Migration. This narrows down the hits to just 3, and they are all in the Full-System Migration Guide.
The last thing to note is that if you had not obtained the results that you were looking for, there’s a simple way to broaden the search. Click the link labeled C to search not just the Admin docs, but all SAS documentation for the same term. I use that trick all the time.
Other Useful Features
Changing Languages
Generally, the Help Center will honor your browser’s locale settings. The menus of SAS Help Center should be in your preferred language, and the content will be displayed in your language unless it has not been translated, in which case it will default back to English.
However, note that if you follow a hyperlink that includes a locale, for example: https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/sasadmincdc… this locale will take precedence over your browser preference. If you know the two-character code for your preferred language, you can manually modify the URL.
At the bottom of the Help Center window is the Language selector. Click it to get a list of the languages that the current document is available in. Here is an example from the SAS Studio documentation:
Select the language of your choice. A new tab (or window) opens with the current document in the chosen language, and additionally, the Help Center menus will also be in the chosen language. Within a document collection, the individual documents might not have all been translated into the same languages.
Changing Versions
There is also a Version selector that enables you to rapidly switch between versions of the docs. It’s located in the main banner, after the document title. Here is an example from the SAS Viya Platform Administration guide:
Click the version that you want to use. The content reloads for the chosen version.
Note that if you access a page that corresponds to a version that is no longer fully supported you get a warning message:
Follow the link to go to the most up-to-date version of that page, or use the version selector to make your own choice. To reiterate, if you use the Help Center link in your software, you always land in the corresponding version of the documentation.
Thanks for reading. I hope this article helps you get the most out of SAS documentation. I would love to hear your feedback.
... View more
