UKC

Looking at applying for a new role and they require some knowledge of this software. I don't have any, undeterred.
I'm solid on with MS office and tend to learn about software quickly.

Does anyone have any experience of using SAS? Is it easy to pick up?

In reply to goldmember:

I've worked for SAS (same company, different project), so my knowledge is fairly limited. As far as I remember, it is a programming language, somewhat might be similar to Matlab or R. SAS is a lower level language, hence might be simpler to understand in the beginning. Not so easy to use, sometimes. If you are good at maths or had any programming experience, it would not be too difficult.

Here are some examples of the code: http://ftp.sas.com/samples/A59343 . There are quite few tutorials online, but it really depends on why does the company want you to know SAS. Is it SAS programming you are going to do? If so, then you should be proficient. If not, then you might just need to edit few lines of code now and then, and possibly someone else would be able to help you.

In reply to PPP:

My understanding of this section of the role is that SAS will be used to analyse data imported for excel. I’ll get on you tube to for the videos.

In reply to goldmember:

I use SAS regularly. It really depends how they expect you to use it and what SAS software they have. There are lots of different SAS tools. Enterprise guide can be used by writing long programmes but also has drag/drop/wizard approach to many functions, so quite easy to start using for basic analysis. I've not used visual analytics which is meant to be even more user friendly but If you will be using base SAS and creating new analyses then this will be a whole new programming language for you. It is powerful though, so you get lots of output for a few lines of code. Also the strength of SAS is its statistical analysis procedures, so you may need a good understanding of statistics.

In reply to goldmember:

Hi Gold,

It depends on the role you are going for, if its clinical reasearch/biostatistics then lookup SDTM, ADaM standards on OPENCDISC, you should be able also find how to program tables, figures and listings (TFL's).

In reply to goldmember:

I used it in the late 1990s and it was clunky as hell and very programmatical - might well have improved, but the way SAP is just as horrible as it always was would suggest it might not have done