TrustRadius Insights for SAS Visual Analytics are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Fast and Efficient Data Presentation: Users consistently praise SAS VA for its speed and efficiency in presenting data across various axes. Many reviewers state that the tool allows them to quickly analyze large volumes of data and generate meaningful insights.
Comprehensive Analytics Package: Reviewers appreciate that SAS VA offers both ETL, Extract, Transform, Load, and analytics capabilities in one package. This comprehensive suite of features makes it a valuable tool for users who need to perform a wide range of tasks from data extraction to advanced analytics.
Easy-to-Use Interface with Drag-and-Drop Functionality: The user interface of SAS VA has been commended for its simplicity and ease of use. Multiple reviewers mention the drag-and-drop functionality, which allows users to easily perform complex analytics tasks without requiring extensive coding or technical expertise.
It is majorly used to explore our data and discover new patterns. It aids in answering any curious mind's research questions. And most importantly it helps share the answers and the insights to relevant stakeholders in all the ways they can understand. It makes the data analyst's job easier and decision maker's decisions smarter.
Pros
Robust software
Amazing Microsoft Office Integration
Always increasing number of features
Cons
It can be sometimes be little clunky
Need for seamless integration with more external softwares like R
Installation, maintenance and user management can be made more simpler
Likelihood to Recommend
Substantial discounts to plenty of industries, ample of users to support the ever growing community and industry specific solutions that work; all make it extremely appropriate for us.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 1001-5000 employees)
The Institutional Research Department at the college uses the full functionality of SAS BI to manipulate data, and produce reports and dashboards. These products are placed on the SAS Information Delivery Portal for use by administrators, deans and other staff across the college in data-driven decision making. Having a centralized repository for reports that are timely, interactive and easy to use has helped our employees in their decision making.
Pros
Collect and combine data from multiple sources. For example, data from the college database, the National Student Clearinghouse and our student services tracking software can combine to feed one report.
Condense millions of rows of data into a single, easy to use report. For example, we can produce a cube that is collapsed at a high level, and users can drill down to their area of interest in seconds.
Create interactive reports. It was important that our reports contained the ability for users to play with the data. They had to be able to filter large datasets, drag and drop comparison groups into graphs, and drill down to student-level data. SAS BI provided all of this and more.
Cons
There will be a steep learning curve for individuals transitioning from BASE SAS to SAS BI. Our department was filled with experienced SAS programmers, but that did little to prepare us for the challenges of SAS BI. Training will be a must.
It is possible, but extremely difficult to customize the web-based portions of SAS BI, like the Information Delivery Portal or Web Report Studio. Having an out-of-the box solution is great to get up and coming quickly, but customizing the look and feel for the web-based users will require some previous web design skills.
In order to fully appreciate the features of SAS BI, you absolutely need someone on your team with a background in platform administration, security, web design or some other basic IT skills. Alternatively, you may just need strong support from your IT department. Simply having a group of individuals experienced in BASE SAS will not cut it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Implementing SAS BI will work best when you either have strong IT support or someone on your team with IT experience. We naively went into this adventure with a group of researchers who could not fully articulate what a virtual server was. That was a mistake. SAS BI is typically installed in a multi-tier, multi-server environment. Getting the server configuration and server sizing correct from the outset is critical and the SAS organization can only help so much without inside knowledge of the needs of your organization. SAS BI is also well-suited for organizations which do not have an existing reporting solution. Previously, our organization had no way to get data into the hands of our users outside of ad-hoc requests delivered as Excel tables or graphs. This was a great way to get up and running quickly delivering interactive reports that are accessible from anywhere and updated daily.
