Hi, could anyone provide me with understanding of the following:
Situation: I am importing with PROC IMPORT experimental response data stored in five Excel sheets (response data for five different coating types). In each sheet, the response column has 300 obs, all numeric values except for a (very) few missing values denoted in the sheet by a dot (.). Only two of the five sheets have missing responses.
Problem: For the two sheets that contain missing values, SAS imports the response column as character datatype.
I understand that the datatype for the column is determined based on the first 8 rows. The missing values are way below these first rows, so 100% sure SAS should import this column as numeric datatype. Why doesn't it?! How to remedy?!
FYI:
%MACRO makeds;
%do i=1 %to 5;
filename ref '...&i..xls';
PROC IMPORT out=work.intermediate datafile=ref dbms=xls replace;
sheet="Sheet1";
RUN;
DATA mylib.coating&i;
set work.intermediate; --> intermediate dataset has character column when sheet contains some missing values (.), why??
coating=&i;
RUN;
%end;
%MEND makeds;
Many thanks for your insights!
