Michelle:
What would be nice would be if Microsoft had something that allowed Office 2000 to open SpreadsheetML files. But I don't believe they ever released anything like that. I know they've issued some compatibility tools so Office 2003 folks can read Office 2007 files (including the new Excel OpenXML format), but nothing seems to go back to Office 2000.
Here's the issue...yes...there is a way to make multi-worksheet files for Office 2000
1) use Proc Export or the SAS Libname engine for Excel to make multi-worksheet files (this requires SAS/Access to PC file formats) -- this also results in very plain output -- no colors, no fonts, none of the autofilter or column width features of TAGSETS.EXCELXP.
or
2) make a series of separate HTML files (one HTML file for every worksheet) and then link those HTML files together in the structure required by Office 2000. For example:
--a) make a directory called c:\temp\main_report_files
--b) make an HTML file called c:\temp\main_reports.html (one level ABOVE the subdir in #1)
--c) put sheet1.html, sheet2.html, sheet3.html, sheet4.html, etc into the c:\reports\main_report_files directory
--d) also make a filelist.xml file that goes into the c:\reports\main_report_files directory
--e) and of course, when you go to send this, you have to send the main_report file and the sub-directory with ALL of its files and when the person receives the batch of files, they have to maintain the same structure when they save the files onto their system. This is much easier to do if you're just writing the files in this structure on a shared drive.
THEN, when you open main_reports.html -- with Excel, Excel treats each of the sheet1.html...sheetn.html as separate worksheet files.
It's do-able, but klunky. I suppose another thing to try would be for you to build the files with TAGSETS.EXCELXP, but then before you transmit them, run a VB script, that opens the files and then resaves them in Office 2000 format.
You might also check with Tech Support to see whether they know of any other workarounds. There's a new tagset called TAGSETS.TABLEEDITOR that creates HTML files which can be loaded into Excel. I don't know what level of Excel is expected for this tagset. Some info about it is here:
http://support.sas.com/rnd/base/ods/odsmarkup/tableeditor/index.html
http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2008/258-2008.pdf
I don't suppose there's any chance you can use this as an opportunity have your person upgrade???
cynthia