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SAS Enterprise Guide is SAS' best attempt at being user-friendly. Does well at it.
January 25, 2019

SAS Enterprise Guide is SAS' best attempt at being user-friendly. Does well at it.

Thomas Young | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SAS Enterprise Guide

SAS Enterprise Guide is used across the organization for creating a more user-friendly SAS experience. SAS Enterprise is mostly used by analysts that prefer a point-and-click interface as opposed to base SAS programming. The software is used for querying databases, forecasting, and data visualization. It is used every day for advanced analytics in support of others that only know spreadsheet-type work.
  • I think the most useful aspect of SAS Enterprise Guide is the ability to use a point-and-click interface to create graphics, transform data, and perform statistics. The best part is that SAS Enterprise Guide creates base SAS code from the process, making it easy to reproduce analyses.
  • SAS Enterprise Guide makes creating summary statistics about as easy as it gets. If one doesn't know proc means or proc tabulate, one can use SAS Enterprise Guide instead.
  • The time-series forecasting procedures within SAS Enterprise Guide produce fairly good results. SAS Enterprise Guide makes time-series model comparisons relatively straight-forward.
  • SAS Enterprise Guide is nowhere near as efficient as base SAS. The program takes longer to load up, and running analytics on multiple millions of records takes much longer than base SAS.
  • The default coloring schemes of SAS Enterprise Guide are hideous. If you plan on presenting the results of SAS Enterprise Guide graphics, be prepared to make a number of coloring changes.
  • The base SAS code produced by SAS Enterprise Guide is good, although it still requires some clean-up. And sometimes the created code doesn't work when attempting to re-run it on the same analysis. That doesn't happen too often, but sometimes.
  • SAS Enterprise Guide saves tons and tons of time. An analyst that makes $100/hr programming base SAS should be able to get a job done in a third of the time, meaning a savings per day of around $500. If you use SAS or plan to use SAS, I think SAS Enterprise Guide is the best add-on.
  • Because SAS makes many analytical processes easy to perform, sometimes less experienced analysts will pretend to know what they are doing simply by trusting what SAS is doing. Essentially, the software may lure some analysts into a false sense of professional knowledge. If you're someone who criticizes model building for a living, you'll likely need to spend time with such individuals, explaining where they went wrong and what SAS is doing.
  • Although SAS Enterprise Guide is not as fast as base SAS (because of all the additional features), it is still much quicker than any free tool I have tried. The proficiency makes up for the cost of the software.
Of the software tools I have tried, SAS Enterprise Guide is my preferred choice because of the efficiency of processing, the line-by-line processing, the ease of writing code, and the customer support. SAS appears to have put lots of effort into making SAS Enterprise Guide one of the best products the company produces. SAS Enterprise Guide, of course, is not the easiest to simple econometrics. It does take a little more effort to become advanced.
I think SAS Enterprise does a great job for SAS analysts that don't have a very good grasp of base SAS. The software makes SAS much more user-friendly. With that said, SAS Enterprise Guide also does a very good job offering a host of per-packaged graphics and data transformations. I can't image using base SAS without SAS Enterprise anymore. I think SAS Enterprise Guide is most useful for traditional analytical processes, such as time-series forecasting, outlier detection, and econometrics. I think the software is less useful for advanced machine learning or AI. SAS' Enterprise Miner does a much better job at that.