Anyone here use R for anything?

[MiddleAgedKen]

Recently (like a week and a half ago) my hard drive died. I back up regularly, so in terms of important work I lost only about an hour's worth (apart from my time replacing the drive and rebuilding). One of the applications I lost was SAS, and I won't be able to replace that. I got it from my university, and the IT people balked at installing it on a personally owned computer in the first place. (I can still use the data center when I must use SAS for something.)

As an alternative (SAS pricing being on the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" model), I have installed R (which I have tinkered with a very little bit in the past, but not much), and wondered whether anyone here on the forum had any experience with it.