SAS Tutorials for Beginners to Advanced (100% Free Online SAS Course)

Learn SAS Code — The best SAS programming tutorials available on the internet for beginners to advanced users.

Welcome to this tiny space where you get in-depth updated SAS knowledge, guide, a-z tutorials, and case studies with tons of practical examples and programs.

If you’re self taught engineer, computer science graduates or maybe student who are interesting tech and programming, you owe it to yourself to learn SAS programming. 

Thankfully, you can give yourself a world class education without investing years or a big fortune in data analytics degree program.

There are already plenty of resources out there, but some are better than others. You don’t need another random SAS tutorials or “10 best resources” to learn data analytics.

All you need is, structured tutorials, step-by-step guide, SAS code examples to practice, and exact direction to go from zero to beginner and from beginner to advanced level.

This free online SAS course will teach you everything you need in simple words to build your career in data analytics.

Outcomes: You go through all the tutorials available here, do some practice and we guarantee that you become a tech nerd in the BI (Business Intelligence) world holding knowledge around data cleaning, extraction, transformation, advanced modeling, SAS on cloud, Azure and a lot more.

Eventually, you’ll be able to place yourself in the market as SAS programmer, or SAS BI Developer, or Data Analyst, and what not! 

  • What is SAS?

  • What is Business Intelligence?

  • SAS History

  • SAS Modules

  • Where is SAS used for?

  • How to download and install SAS software?

  • SAS tutorials for beginners

  • Base SAS tutorials

What is SAS?

SASStatistical Analysis System” is a statistical software suite developed by SAS Institute for

  • data management
  • advanced analytics,
  • multivariate analysis
  • business intelligence
  • criminal investigation
  • predictive analytics

SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Data Management software and services, SAS helps you to perform the following tasks:

  • data entry, retrieval, and management
  • report writing and graphics design
  • statistical and mathematical analysis
  • business forecasting and decision support
  • operations research and project management
  • applications development

Base SAS software is the heart of the SAS system which is the software product that you will learn to use in this free online course. This is the only place you have to be to learn in-depth SAS programming, tutorials, and information about all the future SAS updates.

What is Business Intelligence(BI) ?

Business intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable insights that help organizations to take data driven decisions. You feed data into BI tools to perform analysis and present analytical findings in reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps that reveal various insights about users and state of the business.

The term Business Intelligence often refers to various tools that is easy to use and access insights about the organization built on available data.

There are many players in the industry at the moment but majorly 2-3 companies have influence in the market since long time such as SAS BI, Microsoft BI, and Oracle BI.

SAS History

The development of SAS began in 1966 at North Carolina State University by James Goodnight, Anthony Barr and John Sall and the project originally intended to analyze agricultural data to improve crop yields.

By 1976 the software had 100 customers and 300 people attended the first SAS user conference in Kissimmee, Florida, that year. Goodnight, Barr, Sall and another early participant, Jane Helwig, founded SAS Institute Inc. as a private company on July 1, 1976, in offices across the street from the university.

Since then, SAS has grown to become one of the largest privately held software companies in the world.

Why SAS Is So Popular In The Job Market?

The main reason could be SAS is around in the industry since long time. There are big giants from various industries such as finance, medical, marketing, etc but not limited to use SAS intensively for years and years.

In this new ear of cloud technology, big data, machine learning and artificial industry, SAS is also advancing their software and tools slowly but steadily. They already have a big customer base and they manage to add new customers as well.

SAS is common in big companies, who don’t really care about the cost of the license, but they care about the: support, validation of the software and responsibility they pay for.

SAS often compared with other popular languages like R and Python. Each language has their own pros and cons, serve better in one industry where doesn’t fit into other industry. (read more about SAS, R, and Python comparison – article)

In this rapidly growing analytics/data science space, SAS is going to continue to play a major role shaping the future and leading in the industry.

SAS Modules

SAS module is a software package, which can also be thought of as a SAS product. Each SAS module refers to a distinct area of capabilities of SAS software.

When you install SAS it has multiple in-built SAS modules which are designed for various analytics and reporting purposes.

Here are some of the common SAS modules or components:


BASE SAS

It is a core component which contains data management facility and a programming language for data analysis.

Base SAS is supported and accessed through many SAS applications, including SAS display manager, Enterprise Guide, and SAS Studio



SAS/STAT®

Take advantage of extensive statistical capabilities to meet the data analysis needs of your entire organization.



SAS/ACCESS® Software

Read, write and update data regardless of its native database or platform. You can easily connect to databases such as Teradata, SQL Server, Oracle DB2 etc.



SAS/GRAPH

You can create simple and complex graphs using this component.



SAS® Viya®

Conquer your analytics challenges, from experimental to mission critical, with faster decisions in the cloud.

SAS Viya enables everyone – data scientists, business analysts, developers and executives alike – to collaborate, scale and operationalize insights, everywhere.



SAS® Data Management

Ensure better, more reliable data integrated from any source.



SAS® Enterprise Miner™

Streamline the data mining process to create highly accurate predictive and descriptive models based on large volumes of data.



SAS® Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning

Solve your most complex problems faster with a single, integrated in-memory environment.


It’s important to know what SAS modules and licensed products installed at your site. The easiest way to list down all the modules or components by executing this small code on SAS Studio, BASE SAS or SAS EG.

/* print sas software details */

proc setinit; 
run;

Where is SAS used for?

SAS is used to discover industry-specific solutions that meet your needs – no matter the size of your organization – from the world leader in business analytics software and services.

SAS is very heavily used in the Banking and Health care industry but not limited to other industries. As per the official website SAS provide various solutions and support following hot industries:

  • Agriculture Analytics
  • Banking
  • Capital Markets
  • Casinos
  • Education
  • Health Care
  • Hotels
  • Insurance
  • Life Sciences
  • Manufacturing
  • Oil & Gas
  • Public Sector
  • Retail & Consumer Goods
  • Small & Midsize Business
  • Sports Analytics
  • Telecom, Media & Technology
  • Travel & Transportation
  • Utilities

How to Download and Install SAS Software?

SAS understand their users and thrive to make their users life as easy as possible. Previously you need to download and install SAS software manually to get started with the SAS. By changing world SAS has already introduced SAS Studio a web-based application.

People like you who want to learn SAS and solve industry problems —no more go through administrative part to install and configure SAS on your computer.

You get free access to SAS (SAS Studio) through SAS® OnDemand for Academics and develop your skills in SAS.

SAS Studio is a web application for SAS that you access through your web browser. Many people program in SAS by using an application on their PC desktop or SAS server. SAS Studio is different because it is a tool that you can use to write and run SAS code through your web browser.

With SAS Studio, you can access your data files, libraries, and existing programs and write new programs. You can also use the predefined tasks in SAS Studio to generate SAS code. When you use SAS Studio, you are also using SAS software behind the scenes.

SAS Studio connects to a SAS server in order to process SAS commands. The SAS server can be a hosted server in a cloud environment, a server in your local environment, or a copy of SAS on your local machine. After the code is processed by the SAS server, the results are returned to SAS Studio in your browser.

SAS Tutorials for Beginners

Fresh articles

BASE SAS Tutorials

Fresh articles