Today I tried to install a SAS format viewer, one of my favorite SAS AF utilities in a virtual machine, and it came out a bad news and a good news.
The bad news is that the website I used to download the SAS Format Viewer (by Frank Poppe) is no longer accessible(LESSON LEARNED: make an offline copy when you check piece of codes online!).
While the good news is, that a company named BiX just released a free version of (yet another) SAS format viewer. I got it tested and it works pretty well, just like Poppe’s version I used.
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I like to work with SAS Display Manager (DMS) in Windows where I can get code editor, log window, output window, data explorer, etc at a NOT-TOO-BAD GUI, and I can also implement some productive SAS AF utilities like format viewer and log checker.
SAS Enterprise Guide(EG) actually is a much modern IDE for SAS programmers and my favorite AF utilities can be also replaced by some handy EG add-ons. Currently I’m not fully engaged in it for my personal development work because
- it consumes more resource than DMS and usually I can’t stand with it.
- EG also doesn’t support all programming features supported by SAS Base, for example, it doesn’t recognize the clipboard behavior showed up in the following demos:
I believe EG will rule the world in the future, and even now, in many sites, it was chosen as the solo interface for SAS programmers. I understand IT admins will benefit it a lot due to easy implantation, maintenance and control, but for SAS programmers, it’s better to have many options.