SAS is a dominant force in the world of analytics. While some may argue it is on its way out, a quick query of current Data Scientist job listing in the NYC area shows many companies are still looking for SAS experience.

Luckily for us, SAS has a free University Edition that we can work with to learn SAS for free.

You can Google SAS University Edition or follow the link below:

http://www.sas.com/en_us/software/university-edition/download-software.html

First you will need to download and install VirtualBox, you can download it from the SAS page. They have a link.

Next download the SAS  OVA package

Once downloaded, just double click on the OVA file and it should automatically install itself into VirtualBox. Note – you must have VirtualBox installed first.

Now, before we can start, you have to make a shared folder on our computer. I just created the following in on my PC.  C:\SasUniversity\Myfolders

Now start VirtualBox: Go to SAS University Edition

Right click and click Settings

Now select Shared Folders – click the blue folder with the green plus sign on the right

Type in the path of your folder, the name of your folder and check Auto-mount and Make Permanent

Close the Setting window out and double click on  SAS University Edition to get it started.

Once it fully loads, you will get a screen like this

Type the path given into a browser on your machine.

In my case the path is: http://localhost:10080

Once it opens, click Stat SAS Studio

Here is SAS Studio. The Left panel of the screen manages folders and other admin tasks. The right panel is where we type our code. We are going to start with a very simple task of creating a small data set of car names, # of cylinders, and # of doors.

Here is the code, I will explain  below the picture.

Now to breakdown the code (note the ; (semicolon) at the end of each line)

DATA cars;  -- this names our data set
INPUT NAME$ CYLINDERS DOORS;  -- names our variables (or columns if you 
                                 will) note the $ after NAME - this 
                                 indicates NAME is
                                 a string
datalines;  -- the data to input into our set will follow below
               you may see some people use CARDS; in place of 
               datalines I believe this dates back to earlier  
              versions where one told how much memory to associate 
              to each row. Now they are interchangeable.
Miata 4 2
Sonata 4 4
Corvette 8 2
Mustang 8 2
Civic 4 2
Accord 4 4
Elentra 4 4
;                 -- end of datalines
RUN;              -- run command - like the go in SQL

 

Now click the Run icon above your code

And view the output – we have created a data set – congrats!!