I'd like to use SAS, what do I do now?

SAS is available for your use via three different methods. First, you may go to sas.com and download a personal copy of SAS University. SAS is also available on the ITS Virtual Lab (VLAB) and also on the Monsoon High Performance Cluster. Documentation for using SAS on the HPC may be found at http://www2.nau.edu/stat-lic/Example-SAS-code-for-Monsoon.html.

Using SAS on VLAB by Faculty and Staff

The VLAB is available remotely usng a Remote Desktop Client on the Mac or Windows. As a faculty or staff member, you will automatically have an H drive attached which is a 25gb storage area supplied by the MENSA in ITS. Informtion on the Bonsai H drive may be found at http://www.nau.edu/its/Network-Drives/Bonsai/. Files that you be analysing and working with in SAS will need to be stored on your Bonsai drive.

Once you have a connection to the VLAB, you will click on the NAU Shield Icon in the lower left part of the window. Select - All Programs, then work your way to the SAS program as shown in the following image:

Once SAS is up and running you will then need to access your saved SAS programs or create new ones to work with the data that you have saved for analysis. The data should to be housed on your H drive for VLAB. For example, let's say my data file is named Example1.sdf and the SAS program that I have or will save is Example1.sas. If the data and the SAS program file are saved on your H drive in a folder named SASData, your sas code in SAS may look like the following:

Notice that in the sample code, the infile statement points to h:\SASData\Example1.sdf.

SAS on the VLAB will not have access to your local files on your desktop or laptop system. All of your files will need to be copied to your H drive on Bonsai.