topic Re: Unable to copy formatted numeric values from DI Studio 4.7 in SAS Data Management

Unable to copy formatted numeric values from DI Studio 4.7

ENM — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 14:15:44 GMT

Hello,

When we were using SAS 9.3 I could simply select all the below fields, copy them using CTRL-C, and paste them directly into Excel. Now, using SAS 9.4, the two left-hand columns cannot be copied, because they are formatted. Only plain values, such as in the right-hand column, can be copied. If I select all three column and hit CTRL-C, nothing is copied.

The only semi-practical workaround I've found, is to set up an extract where I convert all formatted numerics into characters, which enables me to copy them. However this can be very tedious when there's many numeric columns; especially when there's many dates which must be converted.

Extracting the work table to a CSV-file isn't an option, because these data extractions must be made from our production environment, where I don't have authorization to access PIPE.

Is there any setting I (or an administrator) can adjust in order to enable us to copy formatted numeric values from DI Studio to Excel, like we could in SAS 9.3?

Re: Unable to copy formatted numeric values from DI Studio 4.7

LinusH — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 18:21:32 GMT

I'm just in the process of upgrading, so I haven't tested myself.

But I wonder about this issue. Annoying I believe. But I don't understand why this could be an issue in a production environment. Running jobs interactively and browse partial results seems more like typical development/test situation.

There are other tool that may be more useful for ad-hoc queries and data analysis (and Excel-reporting), such Enterprise Guide.

Re: Unable to copy formatted numeric values from DI Studio 4.7

ENM — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 21:10:11 GMT

True I typically use EG to handle such queries, but once in a while I get a request which can be handled more efficiently by copying a DI Studio job to 'my folder', making some slight adjustments to it there, then copy/pasting the output directly into a spreadsheet. At least that used to be the case, before we migrated to SAS 9.4 and this problem started occurring.

Re: Unable to copy formatted numeric values from DI Studio 4.7

ballardw — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 21:45:17 GMT

Add an ODS output destination perhaps?

Re: Unable to copy formatted numeric values from DI Studio 4.7

LinusH — Tue, 25 Mar 2014 08:43:12 GMT

Either way, you may want to report this to SAS tech support.

What is effective depends on the user, I often use EG, open the deployed SAS code, make my adjustments and execute it.

But I'm glad to hear that there are users/developers who like working in DIS, unfortunately it's often the opposite...

Re: Unable to copy formatted numeric values from DI Studio 4.7

ENM — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 11:51:04 GMT

Thanks, I reported it to tech support last week and will let you know if they resolve the issue for me.