Helping SAS users in their data engineering and reporting activities
Before learning how to program, there are a few things you can already work on.
As you will spend lots of time with a computer, you may want to gain those skills which will still be useful in 10-year time.
Alternatively, use a website like https://www.typingstudy.com/ to practice. On this website, you will be able to select the keyboard specific to your country.
Here, it’s the advice of a grand daughter of a secretary who got three secretary daugthers who learned typing with her 10 fingers by the age of 9/10 on an old typing machine.
First, you need to learn where you should position your fingers when you’re not typing and which finger to use for which key.
Second, take a paragraph in a journal and type it without looking at your keyboard.
It will make your life easier when you will attempt to reproduce the examples given in the training, but also when writing your emails, because you will be able to see exactly what you’re doing and fix things in real time.
Sometime ago, I published a few images showing how to select some text. As a programmer, you will have select lot of text in your career. So let’s acquire those mecanisms.
Navigate in a worksheet : go at the beginning (A1) or at the end using the previously mentionned shortcuts
Navigate between the worksheets using Ctrl+ Page Up/Page Down.
Understand the impact of the dollar of the cell definition e.g. $C$3 i.e. understand what happens when copying it to another cell, and change the cell definition using F4.
Edit a file name using F2.
Repeat the previous task (set the selected text in bold) using F4.