Introducing the SAS Environment

Introduction to the SAS Environment

In this section you will learn about the various ways that you can run SAS programs. More importantly, it explains the different modes that SAS can run in, and which modes are best, depending on the types of jobs you are doing.

This section introduces the SAS windowing environment, which is the default processing mode.

Even though SAS has a different appearance for each operating environment, most of the actions that are available from the menus are the same.

One of the biggest differences between operating environments is the way that you select menu items. If your workstation is not equipped with a mouse, then here are the keyboard equivalents to mouse actions:

Mouse Action	Keyboard Equivalent
double-click	type an s or an x in the space next to the item, then press the ENTER or RETURN key.
right-click	instead of right-clicking an item, type ? in the space next to the item, then press the ENTER or RETURN key.

Examples in this documentation show SAS windows as they appear in the Microsoft Windows environment. For the most part, corresponding windows in other operating environments show similar results. If you do not see the drop-down menus in your operating environment, then enter the global command PMENU at a command prompt.

Prerequisites

To understand the discussions in this section, you should be familiar with the basics of DATA step programming that are presented in Understanding DATA Step Processing.

Operating Environment Differences

Even though SAS has a different appearance for each operating environment, most of the actions that are available from the menus are the same.

Mouse Action	Keyboard Equivalent
double-click the item	type an s or an x in the space next to the item, then press the ENTER or RETURN key
right-click the item	type ? in the space next to the item, then press the ENTER or RETURN key

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