Copying from SAS EG to Excel results in Excel seeing it as scientific notation -- need original

[SASGeek]

Hello,

My company uses SAS EG on a grid but to get the results  to Excel we need to copy down to a linux site and use a transfer program to get it into excel. Nice for larger reports but for smaller, it's a pain. I use copy/paste but the result in Excel is 9.9E+27 instead of 000000000000990000000012345678900837

In my other company I was able to take a result from EG, and export to Excel directly. Prior to that I had just the SAS PC interface and all was fine. Not in this case. I asked and this company does not have SAS PC (or at least distribute anything other than EG).

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!!

Paula

[ballardw]

This is not a SAS issue. It is an Excel / spreadsheet software issue. The program is trying to be helpful by displaying the value in the assigned with of a cell. If the value is too large and can be interpreted as numeric (i.e. digits and decimal perhaps) then the program will try to show something that fits. So it will revert to scientific notation. SAS does something similar when you use a BEST format that is too small to nicely display the whole value.

Additionally SAS won't even display that many leading zeroes for a number value unless you are using a very wide Z format. So if you get that result you may have sent a character value to Excel that is CHANGING the underlying value to numeric. So you may to provide actual example data values and exactly how you are sending the data to Excel. It may mean that you need to provide better definitions to the process to get Excel to cooperate, possibly involving TAGATTR options to provide attribute instructions for Excel to read.

An example. The programmer tells SAS to display the value of X in 5 columns but the value won't display as an integer in 5 characters so SAS uses exponential notation.

29   data example;
30      x=123456789;
31      put x=best5.;
32   run;

x=123E6

[Kurt_Bremser]

By just copy/pasting into Excel you make Excel think it's a number (which it is not in SAS, as I assume). Try using a preceding single quote when pasting into an Excel cell.