SAS and DDE

[SASPhile]

is there is a reference material for SAS and DDE to excel.
or anyother alternative to DDE?I find DDE to be more confusing.

[Cynthia_sas]

Hi:
If you are working on the Business Intelligence Platform, then I would recommend the SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office instead of DDE.

If you are working in EG with SAS on a server, you will frequently find the DDE methods do not work anyway, for example, there is no Excel on a Unix server that SAS on the server could talk to.

As for alternatives to DDE, many folks are currently using OLE-DB if they are doing .NET or ActiveX or VB types of processes.

But, depending on what you need/want to do, I generally recommend that you look at ODS MSOFFICE2K, ODS MSOFFICE2K_X, ODS TAGSETS.TABLEEDITOR and/or ODS TAGSETS.EXCELXP, as either HTML or XML based output that Excel can open and render.

The only downside of the ODS methods is that you cannot write to a single cell or range of cells in an existing worksheet with ODS -- ODS would make a new output file each time it is used. Only DDE (or ODBC or OLE-DB allow you to write to a particular cell location).

cynthia

[Quentin]

Hi,
Not to disagree with Cynthia (I'm LOVING tagsets.excelxp) but if you decide to stick with DDE, would suggest you search SUGI proceedings for any DDE paper written by Koen Vyverman.

Actually looks like he has links on his personal site, so you don't even have to search:
http://www.sas-consultant.com/professional/papers.html.

--Q. Message was edited by: Quentin

[SASPhile]

Heard about the tagsets.never tried it though.Do you suggest any authors/publications that can give insights on Tagset?