currently.

SAS

SAS is the oldest commercial software currently available. It started out as having two main

components — Base SAS and SAS Stat — that provided the most used statistical calculations.

However, today, it has grown to include many additional components and sublanguages. SAS has

always been so expensive that only organizations with a significant budget can afford to purchase and

use it. However, because individual learners need to be able to practice SAS even if they cannot

afford it, SAS developed a free, online version called SAS OnDemand for Academics (ODA) that is

available at https://welcome.oda.sas.com.

Originally, SAS ran as a command-prompt software without a guided user interface, or GUI, which

came later in the 2000s when PC SAS was invented. In the original SAS, the user would gain access to

datasets in SAS format that resided on a SAS server in the same environment. The user would write

code files using SAS code and run these files against the SAS data. This action would produce a log

file that explained how the code was executed and reported any errors. It would also produce output

that provided the results of the statistical procedures.

Today, the experience of using SAS has been modernized. In PC SAS and SAS ODA, it is easy to view

code, log, and output files in different windows and switch back and forth between them. It is also

easier to import data into and out of the SAS environment and create integrated application pipelines

involving the SAS environment. The new commercial cloud-based version of SAS called Viya is

intended to be used with data stored in the cloud rather than on SAS servers (see the later section

“Storing Data in the Cloud” for more).

SAS is entrenched in some industries, such as pharmaceutical, insurance, and banking, because SAS

has historically been the only program powerful enough to handle the size of their datasets. Those

settings traditionally used SAS servers for data storage. Now, this practice is being challenged

because other analytic options may look more appealing than what SAS has to offer (see the section

“Focusing on open-source and free software”). In addition, many companies are having trouble

maintaining their old-fashioned SAS servers and want to move their data to cloud storage. These

industries are looking for SAS users to help them modernize their operations.

Students often find that SAS is challenging to learn when compared to other statistical

software, especially open-source software. Why learn legacy commercial software like SAS

today, when it is so much harder to learn than other software? The answer is that SAS is still

standard software in some domains, such as pharmaceutical research. This means that even if

those organizations choose to eventually migrate away from SAS, they will need to hire SAS

users to help with the migration.

SPSS

SPSS was invented more recently than SAS and runs in a fundamentally different way. SPSS does not

expect you to have a data server the way SAS does. Instead, SPSS runs as a stand-alone program like

PC SAS, and expects you to import data into it for analysis. Therefore, SAS is more likely to be used

in a team environment, while SPSS tends to have individual users.