Introduction to SAS and SAS Studio - SAS Tutorial

- [Narrator] In this course, I'm assuming most of you have never used SAS or have limited experience with SAS. So the best place to start is what is SAS? SAS is a suite of business solutions and technologies to help organizations solve business problems. That's the official slogan but it's much more broad than that. I like to think of it as anyone who needs to manage data or create advanced analytics models. And the functionality of SAS is built around the four data-driven tasks. In this series, I'll show you how to access your data, manage your data, analyze your data, creating inferential models, and of course present your data with some nice plots. And you'll notice everything here revolves around the data table. In SAS all our data sets are going to be on disk, so they'll be on the hard drive, which is a little bit different coming from R. They'll be read into memory as I need them, but that will be seamless behind the scenes and we do not have to worry about that. Now remember, SAS has been around for over 40 years and it's evolved heavily in those 40 years. For example, there's new analytics products, there's new functions, new everything to accomplish what people need to accomplish. Along with that evolution came three different interfaces. The first, the Windowing Environment, was more of a bare bones approach, so it had the code-editor from and center, it had your log, your results, basically everything you need to do a hardcore programming. The second interface, SAS Enterprise Guide, expanded on the Windowing Environment by offering point and click tasks which actually allowed you to skip the programming and SAS Enterprise Guide would create the syntax for you. The third interface, and in my opinion the best interface, is SAS Studio which really couples both Windowing Environment and Enterprise Guide together. So it has the code-editor front and center if you want to just code everything, but it also has lots of point and click functionality which we'll talk about in just a few minutes. Okay, we're going to be using SAS Studio entirely in this series, so all the demonstrations will be done in SAS Studio. So what is SAS Studio? We say it's consistent, meaning you learn one interface that you can use throughout your career, whether you're a student, an independent SAS learner, a consultant, maybe you work at a school, a business, wherever. We say it's available. You can use the same interface wherever you need it. So this is the first interface where you can actually access it from a Mac in a dorm, a Windows desktop, at work, a laptop, or even an iPad. And it's assistive, which I've actually talked about a little bit already. We say it's for programmers, you can do all the coding if you want, but there are point and click functions which actually help create code for you. And this functionality is great to take advantage of if you're either new to SAS or simply new to programming in general. How does SAS Studio work? It's a little bit different than the Windowing Environment Enterprise Guide. SAS Studio is accessed from your browser. So pull up whatever browser you like, Safari, IE, Chrome, it doesn't matter. After you access the interface from the browser, you can then go ahead and run a program and SAS Studio automatically connects to SAS on your machine. The analysis is run on the machine and then the results are brought back to the browsers for you to see them.