An Introduction to SAS Visual Analytics: How to Explore Numbers, Design Reports, and Gain Insight into Your Data

When it comes to business intelligence and analytical capabilities, SAS Visual Analytics is the premier solution for data discovery, visualization, and reporting. An Introduction to SAS Visual Analytics will show you how to make sense of your complex data with the goal of leading you to smarter, data-driven decisions without having to write a single line of code – unless you want to! You will be able to use SAS Visual Analytics to access, prepare, and present your data to anyone anywhere in the world.

SAS Visual Analytics automatically highlights key relationships, outliers, clusters, trends and more. These abilities will guide you to critical insights that inspire action from your data. With this book, you will become proficient using SAS Visual Analytics to present data and results in customizable, robust visualizations, as well as guided analyses through auto-charting. With interactive dashboards, charts, and reports, you will create visualizations which convey clear and actionable insights for any size and type of data.

This book largely focuses on the version of SAS Visual Analytics on SAS 9.4, although it is available on both 9.4 and SAS Viya platforms. Each version is considered the latest release, with subsequent releases planned to continue on each platform; hence, the Viya version works similarly to the 9.4 version and will look familiar. This book covers new features of each and important differences between the two.

With this book, you will learn how to:

• Build your first report using the SAS Visual Analytics Designer
• Prepare a dashboard and determine the best layout
• Effectively use geo-spatial objects to add location analytics to reports
• Understand and use the elements of data visualizations
• Prepare and load your data with the SAS Visual Analytics Data Builder
• Analyze data with a variety of options, including forecasting, word clouds, heat maps, correlation matrix, and more
• Understand administration activities to keep SAS Visual Analytics humming along
• Optimize your environment for considerations such as scalability, availability, and efficiency between components of your SAS software deployment and data providers

About the Authors

Tricia Aanderud, Director of the Data Visualization Practice at Zencos Consulting, provides SAS consulting services to organizations that need assistance understanding how to transform their data into meaningful reports and dashboards. She has been a SAS user since 2002, is a frequent speaker at SAS Global Forum and SAS regional user groups, and is the author of two SAS Press books and one self-published book. She has a background in technical communications, process engineering, and customer service. She has a BA in Mass Communications from Eastern Kentucky University.

Rob Collum is a Principal Technical Architect in the Professional Services Division at SAS. For the past twenty years, Rob has enabled the delivery of high-performance solutions that provide substantial value and meaningful impact to SAS customers around the world. He currently works alongside a team of professionals who partner with other divisions to identify, create, and standardize architectural practices for the newest SAS technologies. Rob received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, is a regular contributor to SAS Global Forum, and has coauthored several SAS certification exams.

Ryan Kumpfmiller works at Zencos Consulting as a SAS and Data Visualization Consultant where he provides consulting services to companies that need support understanding their data and how to get actionable information from it. He has been a SAS user since 2014 and has presented papers at the SouthEast SAS Users Group (SESUG), as well as at SAS Global Forum conferences. Ryan has a BS in Computer Information Systems and an MS in Competitive Intelligence Systems from Robert Morris University.