Hi friends,

I don't have Excel 2007 installed myself. I still use 2003, but one of our users has Excel 2007 installed and is using SAS 9.1.3. He does not succeed in importing and exporting (via the GUI) from and to Excel format (e.g. Error in LIBNAME statement). I have several questions:

1. In what way does SAS need (parts of) the installed Excel? I mean would SAS be able to import from and to export to Excel format (.xls) without an existing Excel installation? If SAS needs Excel then skip to question 7.

If SAS doesn't actually need Excel then the following questions apply:

2. Why does it fail importing and exporting from/to the "old" 2003 format (xls) if Excel 2007 installed and files saved to old (2003) format?

3. Would it help to read the 2003 formatted Excel files with Excel 2003 and to resave them before importing to SAS?

4. Would we have to revert to Excel 2003 (deinstalling 2007)?

5. Is it possible to have both Excel 2003 and 2007 installed and working?

6. Which SAS version would be compatible with the (possibly yet deviant) 2003 format of Excel 2007?

If SAS needs (parts of) an Excel installation then:

7. What is the simplest way to import and export (mainly from a batch program) to the XLS 2003 format with Excel 2007 installed?

8. Is it possible to have both Excel 2003 and 2007 installed and working and would SAS work correctly with Excel files that way?

Regards - Jim. -- Jim Groeneveld, Netherlands Statistician, SAS consultant home.hccnet.nl/jim.groeneveld

My computer and I present macro Count with SPSS-like syntax at PhUSE 2008.