| Zhongshan Cheng |
SAS OnDemand for Academics (ODA) enables free access to SAS software for academic users via a web browser.
Despite its convenience, the platform limits advanced users by disabling X commands, which are commonly used for
tasks like file I/O and local scripting. SASPy, a Python package developed by SAS Institute, enables local Python
environments to interface with remote SAS servers, including ODA. However, it is difficult for users to integrate SASPy
with SAS ODA across multiple different computer systems, including macOS, Linux and Windows systems. This severely
affects the popularities of both SAS ODA and SASPy. To address this issue, this paper provides platform-specific
installation and configuration instructions for Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, along with customization tips to
enhance HTML output formatting and incorporate user-defined SAS macros hosted on GitHub that are specifically written
to handle compressed large data sets. By combining the flexibility of Python, running system commands via Python, the
interactivity of JupyterLab as well as its integration with VScode and GitHub Coplilot for generating SAS codes using
artificial intelligence, and the statistical power of SAS, this setup empowers advanced SAS ODA workflows for research
and instruction. |