Placing underscores when importing

[omega1983]

I am using eg sas 5.1.  I am importing a 144 column excel spreadsheet into sas for data analysis. Examples of my column names are Department ID, Agency, Hire Date, Date Last Promoted, would I have to do a catx('-',variable name) on all 144 columns?  Is there another way?  I want column names to have underscores with a character type because I will need to use them in formulas

[Reeza]

The option is

option validvarname=v9;

or V7;

in EG the default is Any. There's probably a button to click somewhere but I don't know. This can help you google it anyways.

[MichelleHomes]

If you are using the import task in Enterprise Guide there is a checkbox within the import process where you can specify to convert variable names to SAS variable names (or something like that). If you check this box then any special character or space is converted to an underscore for the variable name.

This essentially sets the option that mentioned.