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Best Courses Guides

Achieve SAS Success: 7 Best SAS Courses to Take in 2024

Master the data analytics powerhouse and propel your career with these top SAS courses.

In the fast-paced world of data science and business analytics, one name has stood the test of time: SAS. The acronym for Statistical Analysis System, SAS, is a time-honored pillar of data analysis software, trusted and used by professionals worldwide. Even with the emergence of popular tools and programming languages for data analytics like Python’s libraries (Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, etc.), R, and Julia, SAS remains a potent force in the business analytics landscape.

SAS is renowned for its robust data management capabilities, advanced analytics suite, and widespread industry use, especially in sectors like healthcare and finance. While newer tools offer flexibility and a modern approach, SAS’s reliability, extensive documentation, and superior customer support make it a preferred choice for many organizations.

Whether you’re an absolute beginner seeking to break into the data science field or a seasoned professional looking to expand your skill set, I’ve curated a comprehensive list of both free and paid SAS courses in this article. By enrolling in these courses, you’ll gain the knowledge and tools to extract valuable insights from your data using SAS.

Here are my top picks. Click on one to skip to the course details:

Course Highlight Workload
Best Course for SAS® Base Programming Certification From SAS 50–100 hours
Learn the Basics of SAS Programming in Less Than 2 Hours With Angelica Spratley 1–2 hours
Test Your SAS Skills the Fun Way With Sasensei N/A
Transition From R to SAS With Jordan Bakerman 7–14 hours
Learn SAS Programming Jargon-Free by SASCrunch.com 20 hours
SAS Tutorial From Beginner to Pro by Learnerea 11–12 hours
Ace the SAS Certification Exams With Aslam Khan 12–13 hours

What is SAS?

SAS, short for “Statistical Analysis System”, is a statistical software suite that’s like the Swiss Army Knife of data analysis.

Born in the 1970s at North Carolina State University, SAS has evolved and adapted to the changing technological landscape over its 5 decades of history. Today, it is a multifaceted software suite that allows users to perform an impressive array of tasks: data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and predictive modeling, just to name a few.

From statisticians to data scientists, and from finance professionals to healthcare analysts, SAS users span a broad spectrum. These professionals all have one thing in common: a need to derive meaningful insights from raw, sometimes unwieldy, data. Predicting credit card fraud? Identifying and retaining high-value customers? Optimizing supply chain operations? Or even preventing fires and saving lives? SAS can do it all.

There’s a lot of statistical analysis tools out there that are much more popular than SAS, like Python’s NumPy/Pandas stack or R’s RStudio. So what makes SAS stand out over its competitors?

Well first of all, SAS is a mature and robust tool. Companies with a long history behind them tend to favor tools with a proven track record of stability, as opposed to newer trendy tools that have a lot cooler features, yes, but are more prone to frequent changes and bugs. That’s the reason why SAS has hugged the top spot in the Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Solutions for 16 years in a row now!

And as SAS takes the security of its tools very seriously, providing extensive documentation to assist data analysts in their work, it should come as no surprise that a staggering 90% of Fortune 100 companies or their affiliates choose to be SAS customers. With more than 70,000 organizations around the world using SAS to extract valuable insights from their data, getting a cushy stable job as a data analyst at a well-established company is not far from reach. In fact, SAS’s user-friendly interface and language’s similarity to SQL make it an accessible tool for beginners while remaining a powerful tool for seasoned professionals.

Best Courses Guides Methodology

I built this ranking following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:

  1. Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 100K+ online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 45 SAS courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
  2. Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
  3. Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and they have to fit in a set of criteria and be ranked accordingly: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.

Course Ranking Statistics

Here are some aggregate stats about the ranking:

  • All of these courses with the exception of two are free or free-to-audit.
  • Most of these courses use SAS OnDemand for Academics Edition, which is free for educational use.

Best Course for SAS® Base Programming Certification From SAS

My personal pick for the best SAS Programming course is the SAS® Programming: Essentials training curriculum, designed by the company behind SAS itself. The curriculum prepares learners for the highly-accredited SAS Certified Specialist: Base Programming Using SAS 9.4 exam, which tests your ability to create data structures, manage data, handle errors, and generate reports.

Altogether, once you’ve finished the curriculum, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of SAS programming, empowering you to manipulate, analyze, and present data effectively.

The curriculum is quite popular, and can be taken on the company’s support training website (first part free, second part paid), on Coursera (all courses free-to-audit, paid Coursera Professional certificate), or on LinkedIn Learning (paid subscription and LinkedIn Learning certificate).

As for which provider platform you can choose from:

  • SAS’s support training website: If your employer is paying for the courses and the Base Programmer certification. Can be taken on-demand or live. Includes practice exam, prep guide, exam voucher, and additionally, access to SAS Virtual Lab.
  • Coursera: If you want to audit the whole course for free without certification or want to take the same courses for significantly cheap. Includes additional practice exercises and discussion prompts. You’ll need to set up the exercises by yourself using SAS OnDemand for Academics or any owned SAS software.
  • LinkedIn Learning: If you already have a LinkedIn Learning subscription. You’ll need to set up the exercises by yourself using SAS OnDemand for Academics or any owned SAS software.

All of these courses heavily focus on teaching you how to code, and thus many coding exercises (along with MCQ questions) are provided.

In SAS Programming 1: Essentials, you will:

  • Use SAS programming tools and understand SAS syntax.
  • Access and validate messy, real-world data.
  • Preparing data for analysis by subsetting rows and computing new columns.
  • Analyze and report data to deliver business insights.
  • Export data and results.
  • Use SQL to query and join tables.

Building on this, in SAS Programming 2: Essentials, you will:

  • Understand and control DATA step processing.
  • Create an accumulating column and process data in groups.
  • Manipulate data with functions.
  • Convert column types.
  • Create custom formats.
  • Concatenate and merge tables.
  • Process repetitive code.
  • Restructure tables​.
Institution SAS
Provider Coursera
Instructors Stacey Syphus and Peter Styladis
Level Beginners
Workload 50–100 hours
Enrollments 28K
Rating 4.8 / 5.0 (2.8K reviews)
Certificate Paid

Learn the Basics of SAS Programming in Less Than 2 Hours With Angelica Spratley

Angelica Spratley is a Data Science Teacher and SAS Foundation Instructor. In this free 2-hours long course, she teaches beginners the fundamentals of SAS. By the end of this course, you’ll have a solid foundation in SAS programming in a very short time.

You’ll begin the course by studying SAS’s syntax, which is made up of statements that end with semicolons, forming two main steps: data and proc steps. The data steps are for data manipulation and creating new variables, while proc steps are for processes and data analysis.

Next, you’ll dive SAS programming, starting with the fundamental data analyst weapon — datasets. You’ll learn how to create your own datasets or import them from an external source, as well as handle missing or corrupted data, a common problem with real-world data. You’ll also learn to recognize the special characters that SAS will not read, such as dollar signs, hyphens, and slashes.

Getting data into the right format is half the battle — the other half is to extract insights from them. You’ll wrap up this course with the basics of SAS programming. With if-then statements, you can make decisions about data, and with functions, you can manipulate and transform data in various ways, such as concatenating and rounding. However, what’s more powerful for data analysis and reporting is procedures, which operate on entire datasets. Procedures help you obtain summary statistics, such as means and frequencies.

Channel Learning with Jelly
Provider YouTube
Instructor Angelica Spratley
Level Beginner
Workload 1–2 hours
Views 45K
Likes 1K
Certificate None

Test Your SAS Skills the Fun Way With Sasensei

Learning by doing is the best way to learn. And what’s better than learning by doing? Learning by having fun, of course!

Sasensei is a free-to-sign-up online learning platform to help you master SAS. It does this by testing you on all sorts of SAS topics, such as statements, macro, procedures, options, etc, through flashcards and quizzes.

Just as with websites such as LeetCode, HackerRank, or CodeWars, Sasensei provides a gamified learning experience through the existence of a leaderboard system, where you start as a White Belt and rise through the ranks to higher levels like Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt, Sasamurai, Assassin, and finally, Sasensei. You earn points by performing well in quizzes, answering questions correctly, and also by helping others learn by submitting well-written questions and answers to the question bank.

Not only that, you can also compete with fellow rank-mates by hosting public or private quizzes, which can also be taken either individually or in a group, just like in Kahoot.

Provider Sansensei
Level All levels
Workload N/A
Certificate None

Transition From R to SAS With Jordan Bakerman

SAS® Programming for R Users is, as the name suggests, a course for those who are proficient with the R programming language. Thus, the course assumes that you have prior experience with programming, this course uses a cookbook-style approach which takes common R tasks and teaches you how to accomplish the same tasks using SAS syntax. Expect this course to take less than a day to complete.

Starting with the basics, you’ll figure out the syntax required to import data, alter it to meet your specifications, and learn about the data from summary statistics and graphics. You’ll then customize output analyses with the SAS macro programming language, discuss the syntax that is required to create a variety of linear models, and work in the interactive matrix language.

Just like the first course in this guide, there are two ways you can take this course:

If you’re interested in the course syllabus, this course is structured into several sections:

  • Introduction: Familiarizing yourself with SAS programming and accessing data in SAS libraries.
  • Importing and Reporting Data: Learning the DATA step, manual data entry, importing data, reporting the data, and enhanced reporting.
  • Creating New Variables, Functions, and Data Tables: Creating new variables, using functions, and subsetting and concatenating data tables.
  • Random Number Generation and Plotting: Learning the DO loop and random number generation, single-cell plotting, and multi-cell plotting.
  • Descriptive Procedures, Output Delivery System, and Macros: Exploring the CORR, FREQ, MEANS, and UNIVARIATE procedures, the Output Delivery System (ODS), creating macro variables, and creating macro programs.
  • Analyzing the Data via Inferential Procedures: Learning linear models, generalized linear models, mixed models, and other procedures.
  • Interactive Matrix Language (IML): Covering the basics of IML, modules and subroutines, calling SAS data sets and procedures, and simulations.
  • A Bridge between SAS and R: Calling R from IML, Base SAS Java API, and SAS Enterprise Miner​.
Provider LinkedIn Learning
Instructor Angelica Spratley
Level Beginner
Workload 7–14 hours
Enrollments 43K
Rating 4.7 / 4.0 (210 ratings)
Certificate Free / Paid

Learn SAS Programming Jargon-Free by SASCrunch.com

Part 1 of the SAS Programming Course for Absolute Beginners is a free 20-hours long coding-oriented course with no prior programming experience requirement whatsoever.

Through step-by-step guidance, you’ll delve into the five major SAS topics: SAS Functions, SAS Variables, Data Manipulation, Data Analysis, and Statistical Analysis. These essential skills will not only prepare you for the SAS Base Certification Exam but also equip you to confidently tackle SAS-related job interviews.

You’ll start your SAS journey by familiarizing yourself with its Studio interface. Thus, your first baby steps will be all about datasets, which you’ll learn how to create and manipulate.

Variables and functions are the building blocks of SAS programming. You’ll understand that variables store data and its attributes (like name, type, length, and format), while functions act as shortcuts for specific tasks, like finding the sum of numbers or combining strings together. You’ll master these foundational elements to unlock the full potential of SAS.

Data rarely comes in the perfect format for analysis. Learning data manipulation techniques allows you to clean and organize your data, making it easier to analyze. With these two prior lessons in mind, you’ll learn techniques like sorting, merging, removing duplicate records, and more.

With data at your fingertips, the only thing left to do is to analyze it! First, you’ll perform simple data analysis such as getting the frequency or means of your data. Then, you’ll move on to more complex procedures, such as performing a normality test, plotting histograms, and more. Finally, you’ll learn how to make inferences and predictions through statistical analysis, where you’ll perform all sorts of tests and analysis such as one-sample and chi-square test, and correlation and regression analysis.

Provider SASCrunch
Level Beginner
Workload 20 hours long
Rating 4.8 / 5.0 (87 ratings)
Certificate None

SAS Tutorial From Beginner to Pro by Learnerea

Sometimes a lengthy hassle-free YouTube tutorial is all you need to learn how to use SAS. This 12 hours long course by Learnerea is a complete package for learning SAS Programming even if you do not have any technical background. However, no exercises are provided in this course.

In this comprehensive free SAS tutorial, you’ll start by getting familiar with the SAS University Edition interface. Then, you’ll delve into the core components of SAS, including Data Steps and Procedures, and learn about SAS’s different data types. Moving on, you’ll master the art of table creation, library creation, and importing files into SAS, and after that understand how to use variables and ‘if-then-else’ statements for complex data manipulation.

You’ll be introduced to various procedures — which is the heart of various data analyst methods — such as Proc Print, Proc Sort, Proc Frequency, Proc Transpose, and Proc Contents. You’ll also explore various functions to help you exercise text, numerical, and datetime data into the right format for analysis. Finally, you’ll learn various methods to combine tables in SAS, enhancing your ability to handle and manipulate large and complex data sets.

Channel Learnerea
Provider YouTube
Level Beginner
Workload 11–12 hours
Enrollments 146K
Rating 2.3K
Certificate None

Ace the SAS Certification Exams With Aslam Khan

The Simplest Guide to SAS Programming- SAS Base-SAS Advanced is an Udemy course aimed at both absolute beginners and advanced users who have a desire to learn SAS programming. Taught by Aslam Khan, this course is full of learning resources, including quizzes, coding examples, and even a book of the same name. By the end of this course, you’ll have the knowledge to tackle the following exams:

  • SAS Certified Associate: Programming Fundamentals Using SAS 9.4
  • SAS Certified Specialist: Base Programming Using SAS 9.4
  • SAS Certified Professional: Advanced Programming Using SAS 9.4
  • SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer Using SAS®9

One major thing I like about this course is that its syllabus is designed in a streamlined way, focusing on four main areas:

  • Data preparation: Here, you’ll learn how to import data from multiple sources, create new variables, write SAS functions, and understand the mechanics of SAS datasets.
  • Data structuring: This part helps you level up your skills in transforming data. You’ll learn how to merge and join multiple datasets together, as well as sort (flip upside-down) and transpose (flip sideways) them.
  • Data visualization: This section propels you further into the realm of analytics. It empowers you to gain insightful inferences from your data.
  • Macro programming: The final section educates you on writing your code in a professional and elegant manner​.
Provider Udemy
Instructor Aslam Khan
Level All levels
Workload 12–13 hours
Enrollments 11K
Rating 4.6 / 5.0 (2.1K reviews)
Certificate Paid
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Elham Nazif

Part-time content writer, full-time computer science student.

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