Interactive Reports in SAS® Visual Analytics

Advanced Features and Customization

Nicole Ball

• Publisher: SAS Institute
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781953330550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Mining
• Index: Computer Science

Elevate your reports with more user control and interactive elements

Want to create exciting, user-friendly visualizations to bring greater intelligence to your organization? By mastering the full power of SAS Visual Analytics, you can add features that will enhance your reports and bring more depth and insight to your data. Interactive Reports in SAS Visual Analytics: Advanced Features and Customization is for experienced users who want to harness the advanced functionality of Visual Analytics on SAS Viya to create visualizations or augment existing reports. The book is full of real-world examples and step-by-step instructions to help you unlock the full potential of your reports.

In this book, you will learn how to

• create interactive URL links to external websites
• use parameters to give the viewer more control
• add custom graphs and maps
• execute SAS code using SAS Viya jobs
• and more!

Chapter 1: Introduction

Introduction

The introduction and evolution of technology has increased the amount of time available for analyzing data and presenting those findings to others. Data visualization is a useful part of any project because it fosters a better understanding of the data, which can help with identifying future areas for analysis. Because the human brain can process information displayed in a chart or graph more easily than lists of numbers in tables and spreadsheets, data visualization has quickly become one of the more popular ways to convey messages.

Choosing the best visualization to showcase your data or tell your story is even more important. In fact, as data collection and preparation gets faster and easier, more emphasis is placed on ensuring that your reports are both nice looking and useful. Creating a beautiful, effective report is both an art and a science. Your reports must be visually appealing and easy to use. Creating user-friendly reports, however, can require extra time and effort from the report designer. Not only must the designer understand the audience and their requirements for the report, but the designer also needs to have an intimate knowledge of the reporting tool being used in order to implement the desired functionality.

This book will help you develop that knowledge. It contains a variety of examples that enable you to customize SAS Visual Analytics reports to enhance the viewer experience. Specifically, it walks you through creating interactive links to external websites, using parameters to give the viewer more control over the report, adding custom graphs and third-party visualizations, using SAS code to extend the functionality of the report, and even embedding report content in your own web pages or apps.

This book is recommended for users who are familiar with both basic and advanced functionality of SAS Visual Analytics in SAS Viya and who want to create reports that enable users to exert more control over their experience. This would be a great follow-up to An Introduction to SAS Visual Analytics or for students who have taken the SAS Visual Analytics 1 for SAS Viya: Basics course or the SAS Visual Analytics 2 for SAS Viya: Advanced course.

SAS Visual Analytics

SAS Visual Analytics is data visualization software that enables you to quickly identify trends and patterns in your data and use that insight to solve difficult problems, improve business performance, predict future performance, and mitigate risk.

SAS Visual Analytics is available both on SAS^®9 and in SAS Viya. SAS Visual Analytics in SAS^®9 uses the SAS LASR Analytic Server to store data in memory, whereas SAS Visual Analytics in SAS Viya uses SAS Cloud Analytic Services (CAS), a server that provides the run-time environment for data management and analytics with SAS. Although there are some differences in how each operates behind the scenes, the report designer is accessing data quickly and easily in both cases. In fact, a lot of the functionality between SAS Visual Analytics on SAS^®9 (specifically version 7.5) and SAS Visual Analytics in SAS Viya is the same. Many of the examples in this book can be performed both in SAS^®9 and in SAS Viya. However, SAS Viya does have many features that are not available in SAS^®9 (for example, the examples in Chapter 8 and 10). Examples that can be implemented only in specific versions of SAS Visual Analytics are noted.

Starting in 2020, SAS Viya has been re-engineered to take advantage of the latest cloud technologies and has been designed to be delivered and updated continuously. This enables customers to access new features as they become available or even incorporate updates on their own schedule. Although this approach puts solutions into the hands of the customers more quickly, it makes it a bit challenging to differentiate between versions. Most of the examples in this book were created using SAS Visual Analytics 2020.1 but will also work in future versions and in SAS Visual Analytics 8.5.

SAS Viya

SAS Viya is a cloud-ready analytics and data management engine that uses CAS to process and analyze data. When performing analytics, CAS efficiently spreads big data processing across all nodes in the cluster, which results in very fast operations. In this configuration, CAS has a communications layer that supports fault tolerance, meaning it can continue processing requests even after losing connectivity to some nodes. It does this by distributing work to other nodes. This communications layer also enables you to dynamically delete and add nodes to the system while the server is running.

CAS is designed to run in a single-machine (symmetric multiprocessing, SMP) or multi-machine (massively parallel processing, MPP) configuration. For both configurations, the CAS server uses multi-threaded algorithms to rapidly perform analytic processing on in-memory data of any size. In fact, the CAS server can continue processing data even when the memory capacity of the server is exceeded.

In the single-machine configuration, all processing is completed on one node. The multi-machine configuration, however, consists of one controller and one or more worker nodes, and it provides optimal processing capabilities.

The following applications are available in SAS Viya and are used throughout this book (in no particular order):

• SAS Studio: The programming application that enables you to prepare and create SAS data sets and CAS tables using SAS code and tasks.
• SAS Data Studio: The data preparation application that enables you to prepare CAS tables and create CAS tables using transforms. In SAS^®9, SAS Visual Data Builder enables users to prepare data and create new LASR tables.
• SAS Visual Analytics: The analysis and reporting application that enables you to visualize data, build statistical models, create interactive reports, and view reports in a browser.
• SAS Graph Builder: The custom graph application that enables you to create custom graph objects for use in building reports.
• SAS Environment Manager: The administration application that enables you to manage the environment.

In addition to using SAS Viya applications to access CAS, you can also use scripts via the command line interface (CLI), REST APIs, and third-party languages (such as Python, R, Lua, and Java).

Chapter 2: Creating Advanced Data Items and Filters

Introduction

Before you can begin analyzing your data and creating reports, you need to ensure that you have the correct data for your analysis. You might need to prepare the data before loading it into memory for use in SAS Visual Analytics. Part of the data preparation process can include joining the data, modifying existing data items, creating new data items, or filtering the data to focus on specific areas. Ideally, all data preparation would occur before the data is loaded into memory and ready for use in SAS Visual Analytics, but this is not always the case. Sometimes, while exploring your data, you identify a new data item that needs to be created or discover a new area that you can focus on to refine your analysis. SAS Visual Analytics enables users to easily add data items and filters for these situations.

Users can create calculated items or aggregated measures. Calculated items are created by performing an operation on unaggregated data...