Like unexpectedly seeing this beautiful bird in nature, SAS has tons of free goodies you might be surprised to encounter as you explore your software.

A user asked me how to find products licensed at their workplace and that's how this informative blog got started. While individual organizations may have separate permutations and combinations of SAS software, I’d like to share the list of freebies that comes with a simple BASE SAS license. My colleagues in Education helped finalize this list.

Base SAS is what's shipped free with SAS software. BASE is the mother of all - the language of SAS. BASE SAS gives users the DATA step, PROCs such as CONTENTS, PRINT, REPORT, MEANS, FREQ, SORT, IMPORT/EXPORT for text files, and SQL, ODS including ODS Graphics, and the macro facility.

What are the products that you get access to with Base SAS?

Here's a short list of products you have access to with Base SAS. And did I mention these are all part of your Base SAS licence?

1  -  Languages to extract, manipulate, manage, and report on your data
i.   Data Step - for data manipulation
ii.  PROC SQL - for data management and joins
iii. SAS Macro - for text substitutions
iv.  PERL - for seeking patterns in data
v.   DS2 - for working with big data

2  -  Interfaces of SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio, if on an appropriate operating environment such as Windows, are automatically provided with Base SAS. Not all functionality of these interfaces will work without additional products.

3  -  ODS graphics procedures (SGPLOT, SGSCATTER, and others that start with "SG") *are* part of Base SAS. SAS/GRAPH procedures (GPLOT, GCHART, GMAP and others that start with “G”) do not come with Base SAS.

4  -  PROC IMPORT/PROC EXPORT which allow you to read raw data files such as TXT and CSV are part of Base SAS.

5  -  PROC MEANS which prints summary statistics.

6  -  PROC FREQ which prints frequency tables.

7  -  ODS, or the Output Delivery System, which allows you to create HTML, PDF, RTF, Excel, and PowerPoint files with your SAS results.

How do you know what other products you have licensed?

You are probably familiar with typing these lines of code in your SAS session:

PROC SETINIT;
RUN;

P.S. if you are in in a special interest group (e.g. the government) then include the NOALIAS option. The NOALIAS option removes the alias names for a product bundle that is licensed as a package, for example an ACADEMIC bundle, and lists each licensed product individually.

PROC SETINIT NOALIAS;
RUN;

In your log you will see a listing of all the products. Here’s my log. You’ll see a very long list of SAS products in my log. Because I work for SAS as a trainer, I need to have many more SAS products installed so that I can help different customers with their varying SAS questions.

If you want more and are a super user, you may like this macro. I love it, it creates a bunch of datasets in the work library that show you products licensed, products installed, and any hot fixes applied and much, much more. Did we say this was free too? Go here to download this macro and then run it to watch the magic happen. For more details check out this great blog post by Larry LaRusso.

What are the other products that you can tag on to your BASE SAS license?

A company has to specifically license additional products such as GRAPH, ACCESS, and STAT. There are bundles that customers can license that will put these products together.

• SAS/GRAPH software is a component of the SAS System, an applications system for data access, management, analysis, and presentation. SAS/GRAPH has charting capabilities. Users can customize graphs with the software, and present multiple graphs on a page. It includes procedures like PROC GCHART and GMAP (for creating maps). SAS/GRAPH also includes PROC GEOCODE for locating addresses.
• SAS/Access to PC files allows you to read PC software files such as Microsoft Excel workbooks and Microsoft Access databases and treat them as if they are a native SAS dataset.
• SAS/STAT meets both specialized and enterprise-wide statistical needs from traditional analysis of variance and linear regression to Bayesian inference and high-performance modeling tools for massive data.

So there you have it. The free stuff shipped out with Base SAS and the pieces you can attach on separately. Now what are you waiting for dear reader? Go on, get your hands on these juicy goodies from SAS.  And, let me know if I can help in any way.