Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®
R. Scott Leslie, STATisfy Analytics, San Diego, CA
ABSTRACT
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The SAS Enterprise Guide user interface has a different look and feel than Base SAS (Display Manager) which
may discourage users at first glance. This paper illustrates an array of quick tips to improve your SAS Enterprise
Guide experience. Tips include managing the windows, setting user options, writing quick macros and adding
prompts and notes to programs. Several of these quick tips apply to Base SAS as well.
INTRODUCTION
The initial view of Enterprise Guide (EG) can look complex and daunting to many users. This paper provides some
quick shortcuts and tips that I learned when making the transition from Display Manager to Enterprise Guide. First, I
give a quick tour the default user environment (windows). This is followed by an array of quick suggestions to
improve the user experience. The goal of this paper is to save SAS users time while getting familiar with Enterprise
Guide.
GETTING FAMILIAR WITH THE ENTERPRISE GUIDE INTERFACE
This section is a brief overview on the Enterprise Guide interface. For intermediate EG users familiar with the
Enterprise Guide interface, please proceed to the next sections of this paper.
At first glance, the Enterprise Guide application looks very menu driven and can be unpleasant to traditional SAS
programmers. It took me a while to reconcile the log and output windows. After time, I came to realize that the
interface has many more features than the SAS Display Manager.
All work done in your EG session is organized in one file called a Project with the file extension “.epg”. A sample
project is shown below. All code, data, log and output are contained in the project and represented as Nodes (the
icons) shown in the Process Flow window below. The process flow represents your desktop that displays all your
work. I find this process flow window useful because projects can be broken into steps. For example, instead of
1000 lines of code in one program that don’t have natural breaks you can have 4 or 5 programs as steps within a
process flow. You can always export all code to a single program file by going to File  Export  Export All Code.
The Process Flow and Project Tree windows give programmers an easy view of your entire project. You can also
pull existing SAS programs into your project with shortcuts (non-embedded programs) or place the programs into the
project (embedded programs).
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Display 1. SAS Enterprise Guide Interface
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Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®, continued
CHANGING SAS ENTERPRISE GUIDE SETTINGS
If you would like to change the Enterprise Guide environment such as Project Tree views and outputted results, go to
the Tools  Options. For instance, you can change the format of your output using the Results Results General
option. You can choose to generate SAS Report, HTML, PDF, RTF, and/or text files. You can also change windows
ToolOptionsRestore Window Layout.
Display 2. Changing your Environment with the Options Menu
SAS ENTERPRISE GUIDE VERSIONS
Some users are unaware that EG ships with SAS so purchasing an additional module is not needed. Table 1 lists EG
versions with corresponding Base SAS versions. Earlier EG versions can work with recent Base SAS versions and
vice versa. The latest EG version as of publication of this version is 7.11 which was released in May 2015. Latest
Base SAS version is 9.4 Maintenance Phase 3, or 9.4M3.
Enterprise Guide Version
SAS Version
4.2
9.2
4.3
9.2, 9.3
5.1 (Feb-12)
9.2, 9.3, 9.4
6.1 (Jul-13)
9.2, 9.3, 9.4
7.1 (Oct-14)
9.2, 9.3, 9.4
7.11 (May-15)
9.2, 9.3, 9.4
Table 1. SAS Versions
Display 1 shows Enterprise Guide versions by year relative to Base SAS releases. This image was created using
code from the SAS blogs site - Chris Hemedinger, blogger name=SAS Dummy,
http://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/2013/08/06/eg-versions-through-years/
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Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®, continued
Display 3. SAS Enterprise Guide Versions
QUICK TIPS
The remainder of this paper describes several functions and tips that I’ve learned from reading documentation during
my programming career.
QUICK TIP #1 - CUSTOMIZE YOUR PROCESS FLOW
The process flow represents your desktop that charts all your work. SAS EG automatically arranges the Nodes
(icons) in the Process Flow window by default. A user can turn off this default Auto Arrange feature allowing the
user to drag and place Nodes as desired. To change the feature, right-click anywhere in the Process Flow and
uncheck Auto Arrange.
Display 4. Disable Auto Arrange Feature
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Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®, continued
QUICK TIP #2 – KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
Here are some shortcuts that you may find helpful when coding.
Keystroke
Action
Ctrl + /
Ctrl + Shift + /
Comment code
Uncomment code
Ctrl + G
Prompt for a “Go To” line
Ctrl + Shift + U
Ctrl + Shift + L
Shift + Page Up
Shift + Page Down
Change case of code in editor
Upper case
Lower case
Page up and mark
Page down and mark
Ctrl + I
Formats code
Table 2. Keyboard Shortcuts
QUICK TIP #3 – CODE FORMATTER
Programmers have different coding styles and some adhere to coding conventions more than others. The Code
Formatter tool formats your code to SAS conventions. Right-click in the Program Editor window and select Format
Code or press CTRL + I. Here’s an example.
Before Code Formatter
DATA CARS;
FORMAT MSRP_HIGH 8.;
SET SASHELP.CARS;
IF MSRP >= 39215 THEN MSRP_HIGH=1;
ELSE MSRP_HIGH=0;
LABEL MSRP_HIGH='HIGH-PRICED CAR';
RUN;
After Code Formatter
DATA CARS;
FORMAT MSRP_HIGH 8.;
SET SASHELP.CARS;
IF MSRP >= 39215 THEN
MSRP_HIGH=1;
ELSE MSRP_HIGH=0;
LABEL MSRP_HIGH='HIGH-PRICED CAR';
RUN;
QUICK TIP #4 - ASSIGN AN ABBREVIATION MACRO
You can create abbreviations that write often-used code somewhat like the auto-text feature in Microsoft Word. For
example, you can assign a macro so that typing “pp” will insert this code,
proc print data=test (obs=10);
run;
Assigning an Abbreviation Macro can be done from the Program menu, Program  Add Abbreviation Macro
QUICK TIP #5 - CHANGE THE REPLACING RESULTS PROMPT WINDOW
When submitting code in EG, a default setting asks if you want to replace results from the last time you submitted
code. Users may find this cumbersome because it requires another click when submitting code. You can change
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Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®, continued
this setting by going to Tools  Options  Results. Under the Manage Results section there is a drop down
menu where that can change to “Replace without prompting”.
Here is a description of the 3 Replace results options from the SAS documentation:
Do not replace - does not replace the existing results when you rerun a task. A new task item is added to the
project tree each time you rerun the task. New task objects are also added to the process flow.
Prompt before replacing - prompts you before your existing results are overwritten by new results when you
rerun a task.
Replace without prompting - automatically replaces your existing results when you rerun a task.
Display 5. Replacing Results Feature
QUICK TIP #6 - DATA EXPLORATION FEATURE
The Data Exploration feature, introduced with Version 5.1, allows the user to profile a data set quickly. I find this
useful to run descriptive statistics and visualize a data set. It’s somewhat tricky to find and can be resource intensive
with large data sets. The Data Exploration feature can be found by going to FILE  OPEN  DATA
EXPLORATION.
Here’s a view of the sashelp.cars data set. Notice the Quick Stats Tab on the right side menu
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Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®, continued
Display 6. Data Exploration Feature
QUICK TIP #7 - WORKSPACE LAYOUT
I like to code while viewing data sets so I can see variables names and the data structure. In order to do this, I
change my workspace from the View menu. Here I stack windows to view an open data set and a program.
View Workspace Layout Stacked
Display 7. Workspace Layout Stacked View
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Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®, continued
QUICK TIP #8 – CHANGE THE DEFAULT TITLE AND FOOTER
EG populates footer and titles with default text. For instance, the default footer of a graph could look like this,
“Generated by the SAS System (&_SASSERVERNAME, &SYSSCPL) on %TRIM(%QSYSFUNC(DATE(),
NLDATE20.)) at %TRIM(%SYSFUNC(TIME(), NLTIMAP20.))”
You can change the title and footer text from the Tools  Options  Tasks  Tasks General
Display 8. Workspace Layout Stacked View
QUICK TIP #9 - EXCLUDE WRAPPER CODE
By default, EG displays the ODS statements, %LET statements and other code that is automatically generated by
SAS in the log file. This option applies to both SAS tasks and SAS program files. If you don’t want to see all this code
in the log, uncheck the default setting, “Show generated wrapper code in SAS log”, under Tools  Options and
Results Results General.
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Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®, continued
Output 1. Output from a Data Statement
QUICK TIP #10 – ADD NOTES TO YOUR PROGRAM
You can create a note to accompany a project or files in a project. Notes allow you to,
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Communicate to other users of same project
Reminders for yourself
Track location of files and data sources
Notes are saved as part of the project file. You can link notes to one or more objects in a process flow. For more
information, see Annotating a process flow.
To create notes, go to File  New  Note
Display 9. Adding Notes to Program
CONCLUSION
SAS Enterprise Guide offers features that can accelerate SAS users’ programming capabilities. Knowledge of
several shortcuts can assist users adopting Enterprise Guide.
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Quick Tips for SAS® Enterprise Guide®, continued
RECOMMENDED READING

SAS documentation http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/index.html

Chris Hemedinger’s The SAS Dummy blog. SAS Blogs Home. http://blogs.sas.com/content/sasdummy/

Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide – free learning tutorial available at
http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/guide/tut42/en/menu.htm

Tricia Anderud’s Enterprise Guide page, http://www.bi-notes.com/sas-enterprise-guide/

Tricia Anderud’s Enterprise BI Notes Blog, Data Exploration Feature http://bi-notes.com/2012/06/sas-eg-5-1data-exploration-feature/

Little SAS Book for Enterprise Guide 4.2 – By Susan J. Slaughter, Lora D. Delwiche,
http://www.sas.com/apps/pubscat/bookdetails.jsp?catid=1&pc=61861

SAS Fact Sheet, Accessed 7/09/15 http://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/factsheet/sas-enterpriseguide-101431.pdf
CONTACT INFORMATION
Your comments and questions are valued and encouraged. Contact the author at:
Name: R. Scott Leslie
Enterprise: STATisfy Analytics
City, State: San Diego, CA
Phone: 949-322-5226
E-mail: scottleslie@san.rr.com
Visit my user page on SasCommunity.org, http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/User:Rsleslie
SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS
Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration.
Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.
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