I just put up the learning edition of SAS Enterprise Guide on my home laptop. When you're a good programmer it's easy to be proud and say there's no way a GUI can do as well or as efficient as you can. Probably But can it be useful? Absolutely.

Even though I 'know' how to code, I like point and clicking when that is appropriate. By taking coding burdens off one's hand to save your time for when you really need coding. And it makes some tasks as quick as using Excel. Just because you can code, doesn't mean you should. When I write short snippets of code to bring up a graph, I've got to maintain that bit of code, remember where it is. Once my DS is created, for a few lines of quickie code, I'd rather just run a point and click.

Furthermore, side by side tree and data set views easily permits jumping back and forth between results and data until they are right. It is intuitive and a pleasure to use. You can always break out the code for non-routine tasks, but give EG a chance at your heavier analysis too. It can get quite far on its own.

I have not yet finished exploring EG. Nonetheless I really believe EG is not just for Newbies. You can also convince your Excel-loving pals that for routine reporting, SAS can be just as easy, require less code, and keep results better organized than Excel can. YMMV.

EG is time efficient. I can save SAS for the heavy duty statistical testing, leaving the routine data grabbing, combining, and merging tedium for EG to do.

SAS has competition from many fronts. To promote SAS as competitive product, we have to persuade people that they don't need specialists in house to be able to analyze and report on their data. Coders will be outsourced. Take the initiative yourself to outsource your code to SAS EG so you can focus on where you truly add value.