SAS Enterprise Guide

Score8.1 out of 10

28 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SAS Enterprise Guide are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Flexible in working with different data sources: Users have praised SAS Enterprise Guide for its flexibility in working with various data sources, making it highly adaptable for different teams. Some reviewers specifically mentioned that this feature allows them to easily integrate and analyze data from multiple databases or file formats.

Easy generation of SQL code: Reviewers who may not be proficient in SQL appreciate the ability of SAS Enterprise Guide to generate SQL code easily. This feature simplifies the process of querying databases and extracting relevant information, enabling users to perform data analysis tasks without extensive programming knowledge.

Point-and-click interface for easy data manipulation: The point-and-click interface of SAS Enterprise Guide is highly appreciated by users as it allows them to create graphics, transform data, and perform statistics without the need for extensive programming knowledge. Several reviewers mentioned that this feature enables them to quickly access and manipulate data, saving time and effort in their analyses.

Reviews

8 Reviews

SAS EG is okay, does what you needed 10 years ago, but newer stuff is better

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

December 2, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for analytics, and rough end extracts. This gives our staff administrative permissions to handle inside their SAS workflows, adding external data, and retaining repeatable steps to generate the same extract. We have both PC and Server SAS. My team uses the server a lot to handle larger analytical jobs. It is also used to handle data statistics and verify data quality.

Pros

Flexible to data sources
Works well across teams
Helps with SQL code writing

Cons

Difficult to write quickly, particularly if you need to change something in the data flow
Lots of clicking, slow to develop
Doesn't view data on the fly, hard to see what impact a particular change might have
Lots of licensing costs, very costly for what it does, basically equivalent to Pandas, but with huge cost tag

Likelihood to Recommend

SAS Enterprise Guide is good at taking various datasets and giving analyst/user ability to do some transformations without substantial amounts of code. Once the data is inside SAS, the memory of it is very efficient. Using SAS for data analysis can be helpful. It will give good statistics for you, and it has a robust set of functions that aid analysis.

Ben Holmes

Senior Data Scientist in Information Technology at Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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Powerful tool for analysis

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 22, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAS Enterprise Guide is used by analysts in our unit to generate reports and clean data. It is used to perform analysis on large datasets and to combine data from multiple sources.

Pros

Map out process used to clean data and generate reports
Integrate with base SAS
GUI format is easy to use

Cons

Price
Getting started using this software can be intimidating

Likelihood to Recommend

SAS Enterprise Guide is great for large datasets and visual representation of the data reporting process. It is easier to use than base SAS but allows our seasoned analysts and Epidemiologists to code as well.

Verified User

Program Manager (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

SAS EG Review

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 18, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SAS EG in the Business Intelligence and Research Departments for creating ad hoc and ongoing data shaping for reports. Mostly these are output to CSV files to be ingested into Qlik or Excel for further visualization and exploration. Some of the features EG has like the GUI for filtering, sorting and summarizing the data are useful for investigating the data attributes but most of the time I use short queries in SAS sql to get the insight I'm after. The Explore option in the dataset list in the servers can be handy because it allows you the freedom to use drop downs in the variable names for filters as is the cases in Excel or SAS studio however it's very slow if you're going to do this on a large dataset.

Pros

Ability to load an AutoExec when opening a session ensuring everyone has the same global variables.
Formatting with Ctrl I. If you're reading someone else's code and it's not formatted correctly you can highlight the area and hit Ctrl I.

Cons

SAS Studio has some great examples that can be implemented. Adding a filter to the output datasets for one.
Some issues around having to enter my password every time I open it up. Some people are having this issue and others aren't. SAS admin is at a loss to work out why it's occurring.

Likelihood to Recommend

For writing out longer code creation for shaping data on complicated reports, the clean UI is helpful. If exploring data though, SAS Studio would be better suited given its easier interface for GUI graph building.

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Good tool for data cleaning, analysis and manipulation

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 9, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used SAS Enterprise Guide for data cleaning, data manipulation and data analysis activities. The data gathered from different databases are introduced to the program, furthermore data mapping, data cleaning and analysis rules are coded through the Graphical User Interfaces of SAS EG. Then we get the export of the cleaned data for further analysis such as filtering, searching or grouping.

SAS EG is a powerful tool for data cleaning and analysis activities. We have used SAS EG for finance department. But it can also be used for customer data analysis in marketing or operations departments.

Pros

Data cleaning, reformatting, manipulation and analysis.
User friendly GUI for introducing SAS Queries.
Easy to send the project tree to different users.
Easy to import data from external files such as txt, Excel. Can handle big data sets.
Project tree structure is easy to understand as you need SAS EG to make many calculation activities.

Cons

Process time of data is a bit long. It depends on the size of your data and complexity of your project tree.
There is not enough online free training videos.
While working with the project tree sometimes the links between the modules are broken or the order for running the modules get mixed up. You should know your project tree by heart.

Likelihood to Recommend

Good Scenario: The user is confident with SQL, Algorithm designing or at least have some programming experience before starting SAS EG. Then he can easily import data from databases or external sources and complete actions such as cleaning or analysis. You can group the billing data and consumption of your customers. Clean the data through easy filters then group the customers into segments and start your analysis.

Bad Scenario: When you want to show this analysis in fancy Dashboards. Well it is better to export the final data set and then use a better dashboard tool.

Verified User

Consultant in Finance and Accounting (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

One of the best and easy to use tool for data analysis and data manipulation.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 3, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used in my current project in which I use SAS9.4 and the business problem is related to the churning of customers from retail stores. For that, I use this tool to draw some inferences. Inbuilt procedures give it a lot of power by which work becomes very easy. It is used in all of the departments and as per the client requirements.

Pros

It can load a huge amount of data as compared to R Studio and Excel.
Data processing speed is very fast, millions of records are loaded into this software very easily and data manipulation is also very easy.
Inbuilt Statistical functions and procedures make it very comfortable to use for non analytics professionals as well.

Cons

It is a costly software to use as compared to R studio and Python which are free for users.
No addition to the packages that are currently required for Image processing etc.
It is just a tool that is used for data cleaning or data manipulation or to draw statistical output. I think a number of tools are doing the same. No new changes that I have seen to it from the last 3-4 years.
Data visualization charts are not that good using the tool.

Likelihood to Recommend

SAS EG is well suited in the case of normal reporting and when drawing some inferences. For this, the software is very good. Its coding is also very simple which makes it easier to learn for beginners. The ODS(Output Delivery System) by which we can put the output into PDF/XML formats is also a very unique feature. Scenarios where it is less appropriate include: When we need to perform EDA(Exploratory Data Analysis) through charts and graphs, then this tool fails because of poor visualizing capability.

Akshaya Bhardwaj

Consultant in Information Technology at WNS Global Services (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

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SAS EG

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 1, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

For now, Business Intelligence Analysts use it for writing SAS codes and more recently, we're able to schedule, run, and keep a version history of processes from a SharePoint site. That is so cool as it was a solution we had been looking for to keep a version history of our foremost operational processes. SAS EG is so easy to deal with and manipulate.

Pros

Easy slicing and dicing of data
Keeping version history

Cons

Process flow

Likelihood to Recommend

When you need to keep a version history of your codes, Enterprise Guide is a good go-to. You can easily revert to previous versions though it creates a newer version as well.

Verified User

Employee (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

SAS EG : A wholesome tool to extend analytics capabilities, but cost could be a concern

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 23, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAS EG is being used in the Credit Risk Analytics domain within Wholesale Banking for validating models along with build analytics queries for quick refresh & slide-dice data for the regulatory requirements. Also, we often create project files (.egp) to record the flow of codes. Import/export data and the underlying connections among pieces is also stored in one place. It is frequently used for carrying out statistical analysis like ANOVA, univariate, and regressions for model development.

Pros

EG v7. 1 offers a GUI approach to query building as opposed to predecessors like Base SAS v9.1. It's easy for non-programming background users.
EG offers better connectivity with a remote server, while in an earlier version we had to segregate script using "rsubmit' blocks
Project files is a great feature (with process flow) in EG which was missing in earlier versions.
It's a preferred choice for people with SQL backgrounds, as proc SQL is a quite similar and easy to use procedure.

Cons

Proc Import & Export usage via code is still a problem, rather one needs to do it manually at times (using the wizard).
Visualization capabilities and cost could be an improvement that the next versions should bring.
Cost is also a concern compared to other products.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well Suited to:
1. Carry out ad-hoc analysis and use basic statistical reports.
2. Query Builder for users with GUI likelihood to design queries.
3. For writing complex macros once for repetitive tasks & repeating with multiple iterations of different parameters, it is very useful.
Not Suited for:
1. Using pass through to read large datasets could be very resource & time-consuming.

Rohit Narang

Assistant Vice President in Corporate at HSBC Commercial Banking (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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SAS/Enterprise Guide, the Analyst's swiss knife

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 9, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAS Enterprise Guide is used in several business units including marketing, HR, risk (all units). At a high level, it is used for data preparation for analytics developments (models, segmentation, forecasting, ...) and also for ad-hoc queries and data exploration. Being a 4th level programing language, a lot of business users like it. It is somewhat easy and quick to learn. SAS/Enterprise guide brings that ease at the next level with lots of built-in tasks that can be used instead of code.
So in terms of business problems, let's say that SAS/Enterprise Guide is a tool to answer business questions whichever they are.

Pros

Get detailed information about a datasource quickly with built in statistical tasks.
Join data from different of different nature from multiple sources (provided you have the associated SAS/Access component).
Structure projects with a visual interface and allow dependencies between them. Easy to structure and maintain.

Cons

I would like to see advance interactions with external databases to be able to kill ongoing queries from SAS. As of now, you can stop pretty much any ongoing process besides the one running on a remote database (killing SAS/EG doesn't stop the remote process)
When creating prompts for programs, it would be nice to be able to have conditional prompts (based on the selection of other prompts). The prompts are clearly a recent feature and constantly under development but I wish it would be more powerful.
More of a SAS metadata issue but when loading SAS/EG (first connection to the server), it takes a few seconds which feels like a long time. I really don't understand why the initialization of the session can take so long. Don't get me wrong, this has no real impact on productivity but that 10s delay just feels really like eternity when you want to run some code in a new session.

Likelihood to Recommend

SAS/Enterprise Guide is a great tool to give to an analyst in a company. I call it the swiss knife of analytics. It allows lots of functionalities from the integration of data and transformation to predictive modeling (if you have the Stat module).
I recommend it for ad-hoc data querying and manipulations.
For ETL processes, I suggest going with a proper ETL software that has data tracability.
As for reporting, it will work just fine but don't expect the same levels of customizations and "wow" as reporting softwares such as Tableau.

Mathieu Gaouette

Consultant BI senior - spécialité SAS in Information Technology at Prospective MG inc. (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

18 years of experience

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