Switching to Enterprise Guide: Pros and Cons

Guillaume Colley

Lead Data Analyst

BC Centre For Excellence in HIV/AIDS

May 27th, 2015

Quick Survey

Q1: How many of you EVER used SAS EG ?

Q2: How many of you PRIMARILY use SAS EG ?

Q1-Q2 = Tried but hated it ?

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in thispresentation are solely those of the originalauthor.

These views and opinions do not necessarilyrepresent those of the BC CFE staff, themembers of the VanSUG group, Chuck Norris,and/or any/all other contributors.

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Content

• EG Introduction – Project and Layout

• Process Flow

• Table/Log View

• Library View

• Code Editor

• Conclusion

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EG Introduction: Projects• A project (egp file) can have multiple

Process Flows

• Process Flows can contain multiple program/tables as well as Word/Excel documents, processing nodes, notes, reports…

• You don’t need to save your N programs individually, just 1 egp file.

• Project Recovery automatically saves the current project every X minutes

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EG Introduction: Layout

Process FlowCode Editor LogData View

Project Tree

LibrariesFilesPrompts

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EG Introduction: Layout• Split screen

– It takes some practice to get use to switching between Process Flow screen and Code/Log/Data

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EG Introduction: Layout• Key is to use individual panel dropdown

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Process Flow

• The Process Flow is one of the two main reasons for switching to EG

– “Divide and Conquer” (organize your code in many small steps) really benefits from EG

– Clean, user-friendly, easy to understand and re-run/debug*

* (if the process flow is well designed and organised)

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Process Flow

• Example using SAS Base

• 1 SAS program file

– 1000+ lines

– Have to read all to understand the structure and logic

– Hard to debug

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Process Flow• Example using SAS Base

– Multiple SAS program files

– Easier to understand the structure and logic and debug, but not great.

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Process FlowPrograms

Intermediary Datasets

Reports

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Process Flow• Running process flow

– You can still view, edit programs/tables while EG is running !

Currently running

Queued program

Warning Error

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Process Flow• Prompts

– Fairly easy to assign prompts to each program

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Process Flow• Last execution time

– The projects stores the last execution time for each program

– Right click, Properties

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Process Flow• “Point and Click” tools

– Query builder

– Filter and sort

– Merge

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• Opaque, hard to debug

Table/Log View• Tables “belong” to each program

– EG closes your tables before running

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Table/Log View• Data grid only reads the records to be showed

in the grid– Quick display of data even for large datasets

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Table/Log View• Copy/Paste blocs of data into Excel

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Table/Log View• Send data/reports/log to Excel, Word or

PowerPoint

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Table/Log View• Filter/Sort

– Very complete

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Table/Log View• Filter/Sort

– Adds a step in the process flow

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Table/Log View• Logs “belong” to each program

– Will ask you every time you run something if you want to replace or append

– Turn “Project Log” on to get the full project log recorded

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Library View

• Does not refresh automatically

• Right-click, Properties do not show the # of records

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Code Editor

• The Code Editor is the second main reason for switching to EG

– Hightlights matching parentheses !

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Code Editor

• SAS Documentation

– Appears when the cursor is on a keyword or when typing a function

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Code Editor

• Syntax suggestion

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Code Editor

• Format Code

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Conclusion

• For ad-hoc, not intended to be re-used, “quick and dirty” data manipulation, check, or counts:

• For bigger projects, with the possibility of update/recurrence :

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Conclusion

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