Hi:
MSOFFICE2K is creating an HTML file that Excel can open. To answer your questions:
1) When you use an IMAGE in the preimage style attribute, ODS MSOFFICE2K builds an <IMG> tag. To the extent that Excel uses this tag, you can position the image. You would need to investigate in the Excel/Microsoft HTML doc how IMG tags are handled and whether absolute positioning with CSS style properties might be possible. If I use images in titles, however, I notice that Excel usually does not respect any height that I send from the SAS or ODS side. Perhaps Microsoft has an "mso-" style property to control row height.
2) Since ACTIVEX is Microsoft technology, this might be one good choice, however, ANYONE who is going to look at the HTML file that you create MUST have the SAS ACTIVEX controls installed LOCALLY. I'd recommend, instead the ACTXIMG device, which creates output that -looks like- ACTIVEX but without the interactivity and thus, without the need for the ACTIVEX controls.
3) If the standard CSS specification that you're using as the value for the HTMLSTYLE attribute do not work:
[pre]
htmlstyle="width:162pt"
[/pre]
Then you might investigate whether there is an "mso-width" just as you use the "mso-number-format" style property, you might find that a Microsoft specific width attribute would work better. (I don't know for sure whether there is one, but there is likely to be some equivalent ...I just don't know what the name of it would be.) However, I note that when I go into Excel and type some numbers into a spreadsheet and then make the columns wide and save the file as HTML , Microsoft writes this style= attribute into the resulting HTML file:
[pre]
style='mso-width-source:userset;mso-width-alt:8155;width:167pt'
[/pre]
...which implies to me that if SAS is out of the picture, Microsoft has some interesting ways to control width. For example, I don't know how the 167 pt converts to 8155 or what the mso-width-source means, but I do note that Microsoft put similar attributes into any HTML that it creates. So this bears some investigation in the Microsoft documentation.
4) To get rid of the horizontal rule between procedures, you will need to change the style template that use use with the output, as described in this Tech Support note:
http://support.sas.com/kb/23/340.html
(You should find that this information applies to ODS MSOFFICE2K as well as ODS HTML).
cynthia
PS -- if you are going to use the subsequent code in a stored process, or as part of the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform, remember that not all client applications will use Microsoft specific HTML. In particular Web Report Studio and PowerPoint do not accept HTML results from a stored process.