Date:         Thu, 12 Mar 1998 17:55:43 GMT
Reply-To:     johnf@FREENET.EDMONTON.AB.CA
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From:         John Fleming <johnf@FREENET.EDMONTON.AB.CA>
Organization: Edmonton FreeNet, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Subject:      Re: mainframe SAS to Excel?

Boylan, Dave (dboylan@UTILICORP.COM) wrote:
: I'm no expert on mainframe SAS, but if you could produce a "flat" or a
: "csv" (comma separated variables) text file, Excel will have no trouble
: reading it.
 
You beat me to the punch, Dave.  A number of years ago, I used to download
mainframe SAS files to a PC, and then read them into Excel, and that's
precisely the route I took.  I downloaded comma delimited data.
 
I produced the flat file using standard put statements of the form
 
     put 'Variable Name 1' ',' var1 'Variable Name 2' ',' var2;
 
I've quite deliberately put the comma in it's own set of quotes for this
reason.  You can declare a character variable for the comma, and write the
code like this.
 
     c=',';
     put 'Variable Name 1' c var1 'Variable Name 2' c var2;
 
This approach won't let you do any fancy formatting, until you get the
report into Excel, but then, why not do it there anyway?
 
Also, doing everything with put statements may require a bit more coding
than you have in mind, but if you are producing the same report every
month, you only need to write the piece of code once.  Reuse it as often
as you then need.
 
--
John Fleming
Edmonton, Alberta
 
email:    johnf@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca
web page: http://www.freenet.edmonton.ab.ca/~johnf
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