I'm an R person, but I used SAS in a past life, and I have to say, this is very wrong. SAS is nothing at all like an improved Excel in look, operation, or user-

I'm an R person, but I used SAS in a past life, and I have to say, this is very wrong. SAS is nothing at all like an improved Excel in look, operation, or user-base. It can do much of what R can do (build forecast models, ML models, even OR models), but it just looks very different. And the licensing model will make you pull your hair out. I ran into issues both with geography (not being allowed to use my license on a project in another country) and functionality (hey, that's a cool PROC...wait, I don't have the license to call it) I think R and python will win the day, but it's not because SAS is anything like Excel. And there are a shit ton of "serious" data analysis people using SAS. They're just all in the enterprise. Every Fortune 500 company I've worked with used SAS except for one (who used R).