I'm excited to announce the availability of SAS Visual Analytics 8.4, the smartest BI tool on the planet, along with the new SAS Visual Analytics SDK for embedded insights. You might have already seen the What's New page summarizing the VA 8.4 highlights.   In this post, you'll find links to the product documentation pages for those highlights and more so you can dig deeper. Still, there are too many new features to list here, so check out the What’s New in SAS Visual Analytics 8.4: Details product documentation for a comprehensive list of enhancements.   Here are the top five enhancements:   Automated Explanation - Automated Analysis has a new name: Automated Explanation. It also has improved capabilities. We’ve rewritten and redesigned it to give you smarter and clearer insights, more interactivity, and easier-to-read explanations. In seconds, you can get the analytical story for the business that would take hours to do manually. Automated Explanation is a game-changer! Viewer report customization - Take the guesswork out of creating reports by giving your report consumers the ability to customize their reports. Based on the controls you give them, report consumers can change what they see, including legends and chart types. With even more power in SAS VA 8.4, they can create self-service queries like filters, ranks, and custom groups. They can even change business metrics – all with undo and redo. SAS Visual Analytics Software Development Kit (SDK) - The insights you discover with SAS Visual Analytics 8.4 can now be embedded in websites and web apps using the new SDK. You can embed a whole report or individual objects for a unique, innovative, and customized experience. See the article Embedded Insights with SAS Visual Analytics SDK, by @Meera_SAS, to learn much more.  Related measures - With the related measures feature, customers automatically see potential relationships between measures right in the data pane. A subtle indicator highlights measures that may be related to the selected measure, so customers can quickly find relationships to further explore. Work in context - It’s more convenient than ever to craft the perfect chart: Right-click on the visualization and change its settings. Contextual menus and the options bar provide a more guided experience. Do the red and orange bars need to be combined into a single bar called warm colors? Select them and group them right on the bar chart, thereby saving time. Can’t see the whole table at once? Freeze columns in a list table as you view a report, just like a spreadsheet.     Here are just some of my favorite features requested by customers as well.   Reuse objects with data in new reports by using enhanced object templates (see step 2). Customize the location of report & page filter controls (see item seven for report controls and item six for page controls) Print what you see by choosing the new use page size View and edit multiple reports at a time. Easier sharing of reports and objects with specific users and groups. Duplicate data item names are now permitted.   Need more? If you're using VA 7 on SAS 9 or a prior release of VA 8 on SAS Viya, this functional comparison matrix will help you compare SAS VA 8.4 to the release you are using. These How-To videos are new or have been updated for VA 8.4.   Rick Styll SAS Visual Analytics Product Management ... View more

I'm excited to announce the availability of SAS Visual Analytics 8.2! There are just over one hundred enhancements in 8.2, and I wanted to share some of my favorites to help you begin to understand how this release will be valuable to you and your organization. If you want to know more now, there are a few links below to help. If you want to give 8.2 a try, you'll find a link to the free trial where you can use the software and even load a sample of your own data. Look for several new posts to this community from my SAS colleagues in the coming weeks that will go deeper on specific enhancements in SAS Visual Analytics 8.2.   SAS Visual Analytics 8.2 builds upon the redesigned user experience introduced in 8.1. Here's a link to the post from earlier this year that summarized the 8.1 and 7.4 releases. One of the primary goals for the 8.2 release is to enable existing 7.x customers to transition to 8.2 as soon as they are ready. If you are an existing customer, you can perform any analysis and build any report in 8.2 that you can build in VA 7.4 or 8.1, and there is a promotion utility to get all of your existing content, graph templates, and folders to 8.2. There are even new ways developers can embed reports or just individual visualizations from SAS Visual Analytics in custom web applications and pages.   Here are some of the great new capabilities available now.   Analyst/author productivity Autosave for report recovery, so you don't lose any of your work Automatic actions for one-way or two-way interactive filtering and linked selections between visualizations Aggregate calculation enhancements Data suppression to prevent report consumers from guessing values they are unauthorized to see Cumulative totals across any category, not just time Moving averages Scoped aggregations, so you can have different expressions/formulas for a measure for different category crossings , such as subtotals and totals New visualizations Key Values object to display a single numeric value for the most important information Data-Driven Content object to include custom visualizations (e.g. D3.js & C3.js chart libraries) that share data with native visualizations Parallel Coordinates Plot to compare items based on multiple characteristics                                Better location intelligence Custom regions, so that geographical boundaries important to your organization, like sales territories and government districts, can be displayed and shaded Geo-enrichment to leverage demographic, business, landscape, and policy data from ESRI ArcGIS Online (during design or analysis, viewing, and when preparing data) within SAS Visual Analytics Geo-clustering to show either bubbles or point markers on a map, depending on the zoom levels   These are just some of the many enhancements in SAS Visual Analytics 8.2. To learn more, check out these additional resources, and stay tuned for more community posts from SAS.   What's New in SAS Visual Analytics 8.2: Details SAS Visual Analytics 8.2 documentation VA 8.2 free trial registration VA 8.2 How-to videos     Rick Styll SAS Product Management ... View more

We're excited to make a new resource available to you.   The SAS Visual Analytics “Upcoming Features” page gives you an early glimpse at just some of the new features of our next release.   We are hard at work on SAS Visual Analytics 8.2, and there are several more capabilities coming. We will have even more to share soon. Until then, visit the “Upcoming Features” page and get familiar with some of the cool features on the way.​   Rick Styll SAS Product Management ... View more