This is a true story. I have a friend who is a long-time SAS user, but who recently decided to go back to school to earn a graduate degree in statistics. She told me this story about what happened in one of her classes a few days ago.
The professor wanted to show the class how to do something in SAS. He double-clicked his SAS program file, but instead of opening in Display Manager as had always happened before, the program opened in Enterprise Guide. It turns out that the IT support people had updated the software to SAS 9.2 on the computer in the classroom right in the middle of the term.
The professor had never heard of Enterprise Guide before so he assumed that it was the only interface for SAS 9.2. My friend explained that you can still use Display Manager, but that Enterprise Guide is a point-and-click interface for SAS. She also explained that you can run SAS programs in Enterprise Guide. The professor tried to run his program in Enterprise Guide, but when he did, he got a message saying that there was no SAS server.
My friend instructed the professor to open SAS (using Display Manager) via the Start menu, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t there. Apparently the IT person had installed Enterprise Guide but not SAS.
So then the professor ran his example in R, and explained to the students that he likes R better anyway. So what did this class of 20-25 future statisticians learn? They learned that SAS is hard to use. They should use R instead.
I would argue that the real lesson here is that SAS is hard to install. Why is is even possible to install Enterprise Guide without having it connect to a SAS server somewhere? It ought to be impossible to make this mistake.
Thank you to Chris Hemedinger, senior software manager in SAS R&D, for contributing this comment:
Susan, thanks for sharing. We use this feedback, plus other feedback we received directly from customers at events like SAS Global Forum, to try to make SAS and Enterprise Guide easier to install and get started without requiring special knowledge. You already know that the SAS support site (support.sas.com) is a tremendous resource for answers; keep spreading the word.
Susan, thanks for sharing.
We use this feedback, plus other feedback we received directly from customers at events like SAS Global Forum, to try to make SAS and Enterprise Guide easier to install and get started without requiring special knowledge.
You already know that the SAS support site (support.sas.com) is a tremendous resource for answers; keep spreading the word.
Chris
“I would argue that the real lesson here is that SAS is hard to install.”
Not just Enterprise Guide, but everything about SAS software is hard to install – the base product, the DI/BI product, the hot fixes…
Why can’t SAS Institute create a straightforward, minimal-clicks, lots-of-help installation and update system?
“Why is is even possible to install Enterprise Guide without having it connect to a SAS server somewhere? It ought to be impossible to make this mistake.”
I don’t agree. Perhaps it should be discouraged, but it should be possible to install products in any order and still have everything work.
In fact, I think it should be possible to do a complete installation without even having a current SETINIT file – it’s my corporate experience that the software and the setinit are distributed separately by different groups, and there’s no need to make the installation dependent on the setinit.
Jack, thanks for your comment!
I agree with everything you said–except for one little thing. Since Enterprise Guide generates SAS code, it really needs a SAS server (which could be on the same machine!) to run the code. Without that you can look at your data, but you can’t run analyses (at least that is my understanding, I’ve never experienced the exact problem that my friend described). Without a SAS server, Enterprise Guide is not quite useless, but it’s close. However, the real point is that it needs to be easier to install SAS software.
A “Find SAS For Me” Wizard that you could run at any time would be very useful.
Installing SAS is too much like setting up a WiFi connection on my Windows Mobile phone, where I have to know a dozen details which I really don’t care about, and not enough like setting up a WiFi connection on my Mac, which figures out everything it possibly can without asking me about it.
Sometimes I just want to look at data, and not run any analyses. I think I will start trying to use EG as a replacement for the ODBC viewer in Excel.
Enterprise Guide is good for looking at many types of data. Just drag the file name from the Server List window to the Process Flow and Enterprise Guide will open it. Most types of data are converted to SAS data tables.
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