Dear Crystal,

I did evaluate ASAP from Complement Soft and it was pretty good depending on the complexity of your SAS programs/macros etc.

I did find fault with the software but my situation was a bit unusual. However, I was able to take my sas log(s) with mprint and mlogic and symbolgen turned on - re-run my applications - and have their software create a data flow chart and program flow chart.

It was pretty slick.

However, if you have SAS applications with macros that provide different paths depending on the macro values, you would need to re-run the application with all the various macro values to get a TOTAL picture.

It is probably a quick way to get the big picture of an application but it will not answer all possible questions when it comes to program documentation.

On another note, I did document one of my applications with Microsoft Visio and you can do some pretty slick things with that as well. However, it requires you (the analyst) to input all of your flow diagrams, notes, etc.

But what was slick was I could create objects (such a disk file) and link that object to a SAS dataset, an Excel spreadsheet or whatever, and when you clicked on the object, it would open the file so you could see the data directly. And you could do the same thing with programs as well.

Once produced, you can make it web enabled so you used your browser to open the documentation application, and travel through the program code (diagrammed) and click your way through program flow, output SAS datasets, listings, etc etc.

I would like to say this was a major effort to do - it was not automated to do it with a push of a button. But once done, it was slick to give to someone to show them how the system works, and travel through the program flow to see the data become changed/updated/created.

HTH, Charles Patridge

I am sure there will be other suggestions and ideas from other SAS-lers.