BI Notes

Color may have the most impact on your design. People react strongly to color either through culture values or personal choices. As with fonts, color is another element of style. And just like fonts, colors communicate meaning as well. [Read: Understanding the Importance of Color in Reporting] SAS offers many pre-chosen styles or palettes that […]

Recently I was asked to create a Web Analytics dashboard on spec. I decided to use the latest version SAS Visual Analytics 8.1 so I could review the new features. When we wrote the Introduction to SAS Visual Analytics book, we were using beta versions of the application. Here’s some of the process I used […]

I like to read the SAS Visual Analytics area of SAS Communities site. From the site I have overcome issues I had as well as learned other ways to think how you can solve common issues. As many long time SAS users know – there’s always more than one way to accomplish something with SAS! Recently, as […]

A dashboard starts with planning. In my last post, we talked about gauges and when you want to use them. In this post, we will apply the gauges to a dashboard. Gauges cannot live by themselves – they need supporting information. It must be clear how the information supports the gauges. I’ll use the same dashboard […]

Dashboard gauges were once the darling of the executive suite. Some designer took inspiration from a car dashboard and its gauges. A gauge is useful because it tells us how fast we are going or how much gas is in the tank. My newer model dashboard still has gauges but it also states how many miles until empty. That information is […]

It’s nearing the new year and you may have already started preparing reports that have the organization’s goals and the progress toward those goals. However your chart may not be displaying correctly. If your data is not setup properly then you’ll notice that you only have one or two months when you want to see […]

In a past life I worked at a company who had an excellent general manager, she was professional, intelligent, and a role model. It was a small company competing with giants and kicking their butt successfully. She set a new mission for the organization –  we needed to not only meet a customer’s product needs […]

Staying current in your chosen field is a challenge for all those specializing in an IT field. Here’s some tips for keeping up in an ever-changing field.

I’m a visual person – I always need a picture. As a consultant, many times I’m given a thumb drive full of code and asked to make modifications.  When you are on a project with me, you’ll grow weary of hearing me say “Can you draw it?” Something magical happens for me when I see a flow […]

One factor for self-service BI is ensuring that the data is easily understood by the end user. The idea of self service BI is that users with less training can build charts and reports to help them answer their questions. This does put some onus on the data creator to make sure that the data […]

Not all data belongs in SAS Visual Analytics – it’s true. You may have situations where you want to filter and zoom on data and then look at the data in another system. Maybe it’s a list of items that the user wants to follow-up on in a different method. If you are using a […]

In my last post, I warned you about hooking up your huge dataset to a dynamic prompt.  Impending disaster, user unhappiness and worst of all – rework!  Ahhhh the horror of it all!!! I wish I knew a way to tell you when the dataset was too large for the dynamic prompt, but it is […]

During our Debugging and Tuning SAS Stored Processes session, an attendee asked “Why would I choose a dynamic versus static prompt for my stored process?” It was a good question because the choice might make a difference in the stored process speed. Here’s some guidelines. What are the different Population Methods? Stored Processes take user […]

As a SAS stored process developer, a question sometimes pokes its way into my head: “Are people using the stored processes I write?”  In fact, really I have four questions: What stored processes are being used?  Who is using them? When are they being used? How are they using them? I realized what I’ve been missing. […]

The world needs magicians or illusionist.  I love watching illusions.  When I was at the SAS Professional Forum in the UK, there was a illusionist who just knew one card trick after another. Even when he seemed to mess up, he would then point to the card box and say, “Oh your card must be […]