Before you install analysis software like SAS, R or Python you will want to install a couple supporting programs. These tools will help your analysis software.
Install a text editor if you don’t have one. Microsoft Word is NOT a text editor, it is a word processor. Do NOT ever use Word to edit code. Use whatever editor your colleages use. While I use Atom, others I work with like Visual Studio Code (VSC).
Then install these things:
Git is a programming language that can be used to take snapshots of a project and share its code. It is well known because it is the machinery that feeds GitHub (the most commonly used code sharing site on the web).
Installing Git also gives you access to a set of tools inside of a program called GitBash. With GitBash you can type commands to manipulate files on your computer, like you would with the Windows Explorer or with the Windows Powershell, but instead of using Windows commands you type the words used by the UNIX operating system. Because Unix is so old, it can be used for practically any file or text manipulation task. I will write more about it later, but for now know that if you need to automate file manipulation tasks (slicing, dicing, moving, renaming etc.), there is a way to do it quickly and efficiently with UNIX.
TeX and LaTeX are used to write text equations and create PDFs. Anybody who has a PhD in Math will tell you how great they are. You can probably go years without needing to learn how to write LaTeX code, but you will want to have LaTeX installed so other tools like RStudio can write PDFs for you.