topic Re: Difficulty referring to variables in excel in SAS Studio

Difficulty referring to variables in excel

u41125093 — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 06:21:16 GMT

Hey, i'm having trouble referring to variables in excel

PROC UNIVARIATE DATA=SGH;
Var Number_of_pulls_vacuum;
Run;

The error statement is:

100 PROC UNIVARIATE DATA=SGH;

101 Var Number_of_pulls_vacuum;

ERROR: Variable NUMBER_OF_PULLS_VACUUM not found.

102 Run;

The title of the variable in excel and SAS is Number of pulls vacuum

What am i doing wrong?

Kurt_Bremser — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 06:39:37 GMT

@u41125093 wrote:

What am i doing wrong?

<snark> You're using Excel </snark>

Frankly, what happens is that you have strings in your Excel header line that do not meet the conditions for valid SAS names.

Valid SAS names have a maximum length of 32, contain only letters, digits or underlines, and do not start with a digit.

Since SAS 8 or so, non-standard names can be used with a so-called name literal: "some nonstandard name"n

This only works if

options validvarname=any;

is set.

So you have several avenues:

change the header lines in Excel to contain valid SAS names (preferred), and rerun the import
if validvarname=any is set, the dataset was probably imported with the names as they are, so try "Number of pulls vacuum"n
if validvarname=v7 is set, inspect your dataset how the name was imported

ballardw — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 14:40:47 GMT

What does the output of

Proc contents data=sgh;

run;

look like?

Or show the code you are using to connect to Excel.