SAS itself may be on your local PC or it may be on a remote server. Either way, Enterprise Guide is going to prepare your code. Now, this code may be something that you wrote yourself in a SAS program. Or it may have been generated for you through those point-and-click tasks. Either way, Enterprise Guide prepares a code and sends the code to SAS for processing. SAS will go ahead and execute that code. And then it’s going to go ahead and deliver the results back to Enterprise Guide for you to view. So that’s just a little bit of the work that goes on behind the scenes here. Now for us, what you’re probably used to if you use Enterprise Guide before is this concept of the project. A lot of the work done in Enterprise Guide is in this concept of a project. And a project is really a collection of different types of files that you work on within Enterprise Guide.
This could include shortcuts to data, your SAS programs, and log, task, and query, so those orders point-and-click tools, any results that you get from your SAS programs and your task queries and wizards, and maybe even some informational notes for documentation as well. With projects, all of these get packaged into one single file with the .egp extension for the Enterprise Guide project. Now if you’re working with tasks and wizards and queries, then an Enterprise Guide project will be required. However, starting with Enterprise Guide 8.1, if you are a SAS programmer and you want to really just use Enterprise Guide to open up different types of data and write SAS programs, you actually have the option to do that without using a project at all. But keep in mind that projects do have their advantages.
Remember, projects are not just about saving all the files in one single file. But it allows you to control the contents, the sequencing, and updating of the items within a project. So it’s a really great organizational tool. With some of that foundation down, let’s go ahead and see how we can take advantage of some of the features that are available in Enterprise Guide. Let’s go ahead and get started by talking about how to navigate through the SAS Enterprise Guide interface. I have Enterprise Guide opened up, and I’ll specifically be working with Enterprise Guide 8.2. If you want to know which version of Enterprise Guide you have, you’ll want to go to Help and select About SAS Enterprise Guide.
Next to Version, you’ll see your version numbers. So again, I have 8.2. But if you have 8.1, it’ll look really similar to what I have here. I’ll go ahead and click OK. And let’s talk about the layout of the interface. At the top is the main menus and toolbar. On the right-hand side, which takes up most of the Application window, is going to be the work area. And on the left-hand side, we have a navigation area. Let’s talk about the work area and navigation area in a little bit more depth. With the work area, as you open up tables and SAS programs and you run tasks and you want to take a look at those results, you’ll see them listed as individual tabs in the work area. So this is a tab-based interface. Now by default in the work area, you’ll see the start page. And this is just a great way to get started. You can quickly create new programs and projects, open up existing files, access Enterprise Guide learning resources, or even access to SAS community.
In addition, as you open up different types of files, you actually see them on the start page because you’ll see a list of recent items. And you can even pin items at the start page as well. So that’s a little bit about the work area. Let’s talk about the navigation area. By default, you’ll see seven panes here. The first pane is the Project pane. So if you’re working on an Enterprise Guide project, you’ll see that project listed here and also the contents of the project as well. Next is the Open Items page. And the Open Items page will list all the tabs or files that you have open in the work area. You can use this pane to quickly save all the files, quickly close out all those files. It’s really a great organization and management tool for everything that you have open in the work area.
Next is going to be to Git Repositories pane. This provides access to basic features to track changes or manage version control among multiple users. And this is a new pane starting with Enterprise Guide 8.2. Coming down, we have the Servers pane. This displays a list of servers that are known to Enterprise Guide. We have the SAS Folders pane. This will display a list of SAS folders that you can access. The Task pane, so all those point-and-click tasks that you can access. And finally, the Prompt Manager pane to go ahead and manage all the prompts that you have. And this will allow for user input in SAS programs and tasks. So that’s a little bit about the layout. Let’s go ahead and start by adding a table to Enterprise Guide. So I’m going to go ahead and select the Servers pane. I’m going to go ahead expand the name of my server, which is called local.
Libraries, and from the SAS Help Library, I’m going to locate the Class table. Let’s go ahead and double-click on the Class table. And that opens up the table in a separate tab in the work area. Now one neat feature starting with Enterprise Guide 8.1 is the ability to freely move around the panes and tabs that we have. Now to do this, you can right-click on the tab, like Class, and select Float. Or you can simply drag that tab to wherever you’d like. You can move it around freely within the Application window. If you have multiple monitors, you can drag this out to a separate monitor. Or you can take advantage of the layout guide to dock it in the bottom half of the work area, or the right half.
Now to dock this back into its original location, you can right-click the Class tab and select Dock As Tab Document. Or you can simply drag the Class tab back to where it came from. So this is a really great feature if you want to program and look at your data at the same time. You can take advantage of this. Or if you just want to look at multiple tables at the same time. You can take advantage of this as well. Next, let’s go ahead and open up a SAS program that relates to this Class table.
