Fear was written large on the faces of my class as I walked in to set up my SAS Enterprise Guide (EG) course. Participants talked in hushed tones and I wondered what this was all about. I was soon to find out during the introductions. Here are some snippets from various participants:

• “I was told to take the SAS SQL course before I showed up to this class and I’m not a programmer.”
• “I was shown SAS code and believe me, I’m not a coder. That freaked me out completely.”
• “I was told to play a couple of weeks before I took the course because I wouldn’t understand what’s being taught otherwise. Class assumes I already know how to use the SAS Enterprise Guide tool.”

Whoa! I had to brace myself after all these introductions.

Who was providing all this information?

Why are the participants being accidentally misguided? Well-intentioned coworkers I’m sure, but misguided information all the same. And see where it landed our participants. In a state of fear about not knowing how to program in SAS, not knowing how to program in PROC SQL, not knowing how to use the SAS Enterprise Guide tool. That should be enough of a non-motivator, right?

At that point, I decided I had to bust the myth that maybe floating around somewhere that you need to be a programmer, mathematician or a statistician to be able to use SAS Enterprise Guide.

Rest all those fears, dear reader.  SAS Enterprise Guide makes no assumption of your past knowledge or skills. It’s really designed for the non-programmer and non-coder among us. In addition, it packs a hefty punch for the programmers out there who want to leverage tasks to their advantage, so they can turn to EG for canned tasks and write code to customize their EG session.

At the end of the class, the students were blown away by the powerful capability of EG. And they all agreed that past hearsay was unfounded. Phew!

That was an interesting class where every student had been told to take some SAS training beforehand. And they all agreed in unison post-course that their assumptions and fears were completely unfounded.

The retail participant could barely stop himself from jumping up in excitement as he saw the various possibilities on querying data for his store on which checkout lanes moved fastest. Which clerks had the smallest lines, why were the single queue checkouts performing well? Was it related to the fact that their top performing check-out clerks were placed there? Watching his aha moments as he visualized his data getting a thorough rehaul when he went back to work on Monday using SAS Enterprise Guide.

Here is a handy blog post to get you started thinking about SAS Enterprise Guide.

Now isn’t that way better than trying to study before a course or trying it on our own with no guidance. Feel free to check out SAS blogs to get a more accurate grasp on things.

If you’ve taken a SAS course before, I’m sure you’ll agree that all you have to do is show up!! Have you gotten advice before a SAS course? What form does it take? I’d love to hear from you. As well as your experiences before and after a SAS Training course.