In my humble opinion this subject has been like the one of the top ten favorites that is discussed if not weekly daily. Re-visit the SAS-L digest of prior months

But I do a lot of daily reads of files from 100's of organizations of spreadsheet data and then convert it into SAS datasets for our SAS repository and feeds into Oracle.

You can use the following code ;

data x ; set new ; (this implies you have used the SAS Wizard to execute the import) length charvar $9. ; (value off the file) charvar=filevar ; newvar = input(charvar,9.) ; (Without knowing the data I am guessing at the format...)

(ref. page 556 SAS Lang. V.6 1st ED) Or you can make sure that while in the spreadsheet specifiy what format you want the column to be and the length This process works extremely well for me and it's the only way I work with external data.

Good Luck "Just Curious" Barbara! ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Re: conver character to numeric format Author: Panos PAPANIKOLAOU <PapanikolaouP@CARDIFF.AC.UK> at SMTP-GATEWAY Date: 1/23/1999 8:16 PM

Dear All,

I have a SAS perm data-set which was created after importing an Excel file. SAS 6.12 v. was capable of reading correctly the Xls file. However, the Excel file had some variables read as character. When I looked at the variables and printed several cases I noticed that these are NOT character but actually NUMERIC. I have used SAS to produce the means & std of these variables. It rightly responds telling me that these variables are CHARACTER. (This is because they have been initially read as character, an imported Excel file).

To me, it would be very complicated indeed to change the variable format in Excel and the read it in SAS. So, I am wondering if I'd have SAS read these variables as NUMERIC. That is, do you know the way that SAS will be able to recognise these variables not as CHARACTER but as NUMERIC variables.If so, this would allow me to use the proc means and univariate to derive useful stats info about them. I would be grateful if I would have any suggestions on what to do.

Thank you very much indeed for taking the time to consider my request. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours Sincerely Panos Papanikolaou Research Fellow UWCM Great Britain.