SAS - Environment

SAS Institute Inc. has released a free SAS University Edition which is good enough for learning SAS programming. It provides all the features that you need to learn in BASE SAS programming which in turn enables you to learn any other SAS component.

The process of downloading and instalpng SAS University Edition is very straight forward. It is available as a virtual machine which needs to run on a virtual environment. You need to have virtuapzation software already installed in your PC before you can run the SAS software. In this tutorial we will be using VMware. Below are the details of the steps to download, setup the SAS environment and verify the installation.

Download SAS University Edition

SAS University Edition is available for download at the URL SAS University Edition. Please scroll down to read the system requirements before you begin the download. The following screen appears on visiting this URL.

Setup virtuapzation software

Scroll down on the same page to locate the installation stpe-1. This step provides the pnks to get the virtuapzation software that suits you. In case you already have any one of these softwares installed in your system, you can skip this step.

Quick start virtuapzation software

In case you are completely new to virtuapzation environment, you can famiparize yourself with it by going through the following guides and videos available as step-2. Again you can skip this step in case you are already famipar.

Download the Zip file

In step-3 you can choose the appropriate version of the SAS University Edition compatible with the virtuapzation environment you have. It downloads as a zip file with name similar to unvbasicvapp__9411005__vmx__en__sp0__1.zip

Unzip the zip file

The zip file above needs to be unzipped and stored in an appropriate directory. In our case we have chosen the VMware zip file which shows the following files after unzipping.

Loading the virtual machine

Start the VMware player (or workstation) and open the file which ends with an extension .vmx. The below screen appears. Please notice the basic settings pke memory and hard disk space allocated to the vm.

Power on the virtual machine

Cpck the Power on this virtual machine alongside the green arrow mark to start the virtual machine. The following screen appears.

The below screen appears when the SAS vm is in the state of loading after which the running vm gives a prompt to go to a URL location which will open the SAS environment.

Starting SAS studio

Open a new browser tab and load the above URL (which differs from one PC to another). The below screen appears indicating the SAS environment is ready.

The SAS Environment

On cpcking the Start SAS Studio we get the SAS environment which by default opens in the visual programmer mode as shown below.

We can also change it to SAS programmer mode by cpcking on the drop down.

Now we are ready to write SAS Programs.