Three ways to run SAS

After SAS is installed, you will have a SAS program group on your Windows machine (use the key to bring up the Search window and then click the ‘All apps’ button below the search bar). In the program group, there are three ways you can write and run your SAS programs:

Open

SAS 9.4 - a somewhat dated user-interface that use the latest SAS program code and runs the fastest. There is no IntelliSense in this program (where the PROC options and parameters are displayed as you type).

Open

SAS Studio 3.82 - runs the SAS program in your default browser. This interface is the one most people are familiar with from SAS OnDemand or the previous Faculty of Health SAS server. SAS Studio takes longer to start up because it needs to launch a webserver locally for your browser to use. SAS Studio has IntelliSense prompts to help build code but execution times are a slower than under SAS 9.4

SAS 9.4 Enterprise Guide 8.4 (64-bit) - Similar to SAS Studio but runs as a separate program - it does not run a web server locally so it starts up faster. Enterprise Guide allows you to organize your code, data and results into projects or you can work with programs and data outside of a project (using the “Open Items” option instead of “Open Project”). Like SAS Studio, SAS Enterprise Guide has IntelliSense prompts to help with building code. Program run times are faster than SAS Studio but not as fast as SAS 9.4.

Which should I choose? When learning or writing new code, SAS Studio or SAS Enterprise Guide are good options. Running code in these programs is fine too but, if your code is computationally intensive, you should consider developing your programs with subsets of your data using SAS Studio or SAS Enterprise Guide and then running your final analysis using SAS 9.4.