problem importing date from excel file

[Barkat]

I am having problem in importing the attached excel file. One of the date column is imported as character and number.

[ballardw]

If you use Proc import or the wizard then SAS only exams 8 or so rows of the data to set properties. Because way too many people are not consistent about what they put into spreadsheets you get such behavior.

Many users here don't want to download Excel files because of virus potential, others have such things blocked by security software. Also if you give us Excel we have to create a SAS data set and due to the non-existent constraints on Excel data cells the result we end up with may not have variables of the same type (numeric or character) and even values.

Might consider saving the file to CSV from Excel, import the resulting CSV file and use the option available with delimited files to use a large value for the Guessingrows parameter so more rows of data are examined before setting properties.

Also, then  Proc import writes code to the log of how the file was read. The code could be copied from the log and edited to change the informat or other properties of the variables, including names and such, as needed.