What is SAS/GRAPH?

SAS/GRAPH is data visualization and presentation software. It creates and delivers accurate, high-impact visuals that enable decision makers to gain a quick understanding of critical business issues. As such, SAS/GRAPH does the following:

• organizes the presentation of your data and visually represents the relationship between data values as two- and three-dimensional graphs, including charts, plots, and maps.
• enhances the appearance of your output by enabling you to select text fonts, colors, patterns, and line styles, and control the size and position of many graphics elements.
• creates presentation graphics. SAS/GRAPH can create text slides, display several graphs at one time, combine graphs and text in one display, and create automated presentations.
• generates a variety of graphics output that you can display on your screen or in a web browser, store in catalogs, or review. You can send the graphics output to a hard copy graphics output device such as a laser printer.
• provides utility procedures and statements to manage the output.

Components of SAS/GRAPH Software

There are several components to SAS/GRAPH software:

SAS/GRAPH procedures

enable you to create a variety of graphs, including bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, surface plots, contour plots, and much more. The SAS/GRAPH procedures include the GCHART, GPLOT, GBARLINE, GKPI, GCONTOUR, and G3D procedures, as well as others. These procedures use device drivers to generate output. SAS/GRAPH device drivers enable you to send output directly to your output device. Device drivers enable you to create output in a variety of formats such as PNG, SVG, TIFF, and so on. This document describes these procedures and how to use the SAS/GRAPH devices. SAS/GRAPH GMAP procedure enables you to create a variety of maps, including block, choropleth, prism, and surface maps. The GMAP procedure and all of the other mapping procedures are described in SAS/GRAPH and Base SAS: Mapping Reference.

The Annotate Facility

enables you to generate a special data set of graphics commands from which you can produce graphics output. This data set is referred to as an Annotate data set. You can use it to generate custom graphics or to enhance graphics output from many device-based SAS/GRAPH procedures, including GCHART, GMAP, GPLOT, GBARLINE, GCONTOUR, and G3D, as well as others. Annotation data sets are described in Using Annotate Data Sets.