So far, I have demonstrated programming in SAS. As much as I have argued for using programming as the most efficient way of achieving analysis and teaching statistics in many cases, SAS Studio has created a clever way of generating your programs that allows you the comfort of a point-and-click type approach that works with SAS programming. This is known as the Visual Programmer mode.

In the SAS Studio Visual Programmer mode, you can define your dataset, task and variables for SAS Studio using easy-to-understand drag-and-drop methods. As an example of the use of this mode, see Figure 6.7 Example of using the Visual Programmer mode in SAS Studio below.

In this example, I have generated a bar chart simply by doing the following easy steps:

There are many other Tasks and what are called “Snippets” (pieces of code that can be used in various places). You should browse through these – perhaps after reading the book and acquainting yourself with the field of basic statistics – to see what Visual Programmer has to offer. It is an intuitive and pleasing way to generate simple tasks, but has other disadvantages of point-and-click modes, such as lack of the full functionality SAS programming can offer.