Hi:
When you say that you are "less familiar with Enterprise or 9.4", I assume you mean SAS Enterprise Guide or SAS Display Manager on Windows, also known as the SAS Windowing Environment.
An editor is an editor is an editor is an editor (with apologies to Gertrude Stein). All of the SAS Editors have a place to type code; all of the SAS Editors have a way for you to review the SAS log after the code runs. All of the SAS Editors have a way to review results. The look and feel of the editors is different. How you launch each editor is a bit different. How you submit code is a bit different (click the little running man or click the Run menu item). How and where you save code is different. How you address files is slightly different. But this is all minor and you can learn to work with the differences.
SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Studio, SAS Display Manager on Windows are all just different ways to communicate with SAS -- different graphical user interfaces. SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio can work with your code and send it to the main SAS executable program. That main SAS program can reside in any of these places:
1) a local install on a Windows C: drive
2) a network install on a company server
3) a Business Intelligence platform install (like #2, only with a metadata server and more security and other servers in the mix)
4) a cloud install, such as using SAS Studio and Enterprise Guide with SAS on a cloud server (such as our SAS OnDemand for Academics cloud server or an company cloud either on-premises or hosted remotely)
#1, #2 and #3 above are typically company or school configurations. #4 could be a company configuration, but it is also the way we deliver free access to SAS for non-commercial learning purposes. I would NOT recommend uploading your own data, especially patient data to our SODA server just because you only want to use SAS Studio.
SAS University Edition on a Virtual Machine uses SAS Studio to communicate with SAS inside the Unix Virtual Machine. However, SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS on Windows will NOT communicate with SAS this way when using SAS University Edition.
I could type my SAS programs in Notepad or Wordpad or Textpad or even in Word. But I can't submit the code to SAS from any of those editors. However, assuming I saved my typed program and I knew the location of the SAS executable program and I have the right permissions, I could go to a command window and batch submit my SAS program (in most of the above usage scenarios).
We have lots of videos that show how to use Enterprise Guide and if you are a student at NCSU, as your username implies, then you could access training via NCSU's license. You could send mail to elearn@sas.com to find out how a student can access Enterprise Guide training.
Hope this helps convince you to give Enterprise Guide a try. SAS Studio isn't your only resource.
Cynthia