SAS Visual Analytics Overview
SAS Visual Analytics is a powerful, self-service analytics solution designed to help users visually explore data, create interactive reports, and share insightful visualizations. This platform is tailored to facilitate data-driven decision-making across various levels of an organization.
Key Functionality
- Data Exploration and Visualization: SAS Visual Analytics enables users to visually explore data and create smart, interactive visualizations and reports through a single interface. It supports a wide range of visualizations, including box plots, heat maps, animated bubble charts, network diagrams, correlation matrices, and more.
- Augmented Analytics: The software leverages machine learning and natural language explanations to identify key relationships, outliers, clusters, and other vital insights in the data. It automatically suggests related measures and narrates stories hidden in the data, making it easier to understand and explain complex insights.
- Predictive Analytics: Users can perform predictive modeling, scenario analysis, and forecasting without needing to write code. The system automatically selects the most appropriate forecasting model after running multiple models against the data, and it includes forecasting confidence intervals. This enables business analysts to assess possible outcomes and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
- Location Analytics: SAS Visual Analytics integrates traditional data sources with location data, allowing for geographical context analysis. This includes features like travel time, travel distance, and demographics data enrichment with Esri integration, providing a comprehensive view of geospatial data.
- Interactive Reporting and Dashboards: Users can create stunning interactive reports and dashboards that summarize key performance metrics. These reports can be accessed and interacted with via the web and mobile devices, enabling executives and front-line staff to collaborate on insights and make critical business decisions instantly.
- Data Integration: The platform can connect with various data sources, including databases, spreadsheets, and big data platforms like Hadoop. This allows businesses to work with real-time data and gain up-to-the-minute insights without waiting for batch processing or manual uploads.
- Mobile Access: SAS Visual Analytics provides native mobile apps for iOS and Android, allowing users to view and interact with dynamic reports and dashboards on tablets and smartphones. This ensures key decision-makers can stay connected and informed regardless of their location.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): The software includes NLP capabilities, enabling users to interact with data using natural language. This makes querying data more intuitive, allowing users to ask questions and receive relevant visualizations in response.
- Collaboration and Sharing: Users can embed individual visual insights from reports into custom web applications, build interactive stories, or share entire interactive reports. The platform supports seamless integration with Microsoft productivity tools like Excel and Outlook, facilitating collaboration and sharing of insights.
- Developer Integration: SAS Visual Analytics offers open integration for developers, allowing the use of third-party JavaScript libraries like D3 and C3, and providing REST APIs for accessing SAS analytics, data, and services. This flexibility enables creative visualization and customization.
Additional Features
- Self-Service Analytics: Automated forecasting, goal seeking, scenario analysis, decision trees, and other advanced analytics are available at the user’s fingertips, regardless of their skill level.
- Embedded Insights: Users can embed visual insights into various applications, ensuring that data-driven insights are integrated into daily workflows.
- Language Support: The platform supports a wide range of languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and many others, making it accessible to a global user base.
In summary, SAS Visual Analytics is a robust analytics tool that empowers users to uncover hidden insights in their data, create interactive and informative visualizations, and make data-driven decisions with ease. Its comprehensive set of features and functionalities make it an invaluable asset for organizations seeking to leverage their data for strategic advantage.