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Q

What SAS products do I need?

A

Most of what SAS is famous for is contained in base SAS, and that is the product you should focus on as you get started. Base SAS contains the key features for working with data, including importing and exporting data, managing SAS data, creating reports, programming, and debugging. It is the only SAS product you’ll find at some SAS installations. For example, the banking and insurance industries depend on base SAS software, but make little or no use of other SAS products. The SAS System contains dozens of products, and after you get started, it will quickly become obvious if one of the add-on products is key to the work you are doing.

Having said that, I must mention some exceptions, applications and specializations that call for specific additional SAS products.

• If you are a professional statistician, you will want SAS/STAT. It contains hundreds of statistical models, tests, and other tools.
• If you are an economist or a Wall Street analyst, you will want SAS/ETS for time series statistics.
• If all your data comes from a company database, find out whether there is a SAS/ACCESS interface to the specific database management system.
• To create statistical graphs or maps to show at business meetings, you will need SAS/GRAPH.
• If your objective is to create AF applications, interactive applications that run in the SAS environment, you need SAS/AF as part of the development system. SAS/AF is not part of the runtime environment for AF applications.
• A data warehouse or other client-server project in SAS usually requires SAS/CONNECT on all computers and SAS/SHARE on the data servers.

If your initial objective is to learn SAS programming, I recommend SAS Learning Edition. This shrink-wrapped edition of SAS has data-size limitations that prevent you from doing anything big with it — but it is easier to learn SAS by working with small data files anyway.