May 2018
support.sas.com | email the editor
Dear Reader,
After sharing a bedroom for their entire lives, my daughters recently decided it was time for them to get separate rooms. While this meant saying goodbye to our bonus room, my wife and I were OK with the idea – they’re both in high school, and we understand the need for personal space. But we had two unexpected realizations while outfitting the new room: You can get a lot of Ikea furniture into the trunk of a Hyundai, and my wife is better at following instructions than I am. I discovered the latter as we started putting together the bed, dresser, desk and other pieces of furniture we got for the new room. While my wife had the patience to read (and follow) the step-by-step instructions, I would simply find two pieces that looked like they fit and screw them together. I’m here to tell you that her way is better.
As a SAS user, you may have noticed that we’ve started to add similar step-by-step instructions for a lot of our products through our new learning centers. Learning centers are located on a “Learn” tab of select SAS® product web pages and provide you with a clear, easy to follow learning path for moving from new user to expert. The pages highlight the most helpful video content, training, documentation, blogs and community content that SAS has to offer for a particular product.
Best of all, each learning center was developed by a team of product subject matter experts from across SAS, with representatives from R&D, Product Management, Technical Support, Education, Publications, SAS Consulting and other groups. I’ve been involved in a couple of these efforts, and we really dive deep into the product, determining the critical knowledge and primary tasks a user will face. The resulting step-by-step instructions make getting started with the product (in the case of a new user) or expanding your knowledge (for experienced users) easy.
Be sure to visit our 13 active learning centers and check back often – we’re in the process of building and launching many more. Learning centers currently exist for the following products:
SAS® Customer Intelligence 360
SAS® Data Loader for Hadoop
SAS® Decision Manager
SAS® Enterprise Guide®
SAS® Enterprise Miner™
SAS® Event Stream Processing
SAS® Model Manager
SAS® University Edition
SAS® Visual Analytics 7.4
SAS® Visual Analytics 8.2
SAS® Visual Forecasting
SAS® Visual Investigator
SAS® Visual Statistics
Of course, our learning centers represent just a fraction of the resources available to you. Visit our support pages to discover more product-focused resources like our how-to tutorials, SAS communities, documentation, training and technical support.
Thanks for reading,
Larry LaRusso
Editor, SAS Tech Report
Follow me @lalaru102