sas9.4 m5 VARCHAR data type is not supported by the V9 engine.

[zhanghaipo]

Thank you very much for your help. I try not to use stata files to avoid this.

[zhanghaipo]

Thank you very much for your help. If I get a solution, I will share it.

[ChrisNZ]

Any reason you're not using UTF-8? This seems to be the standard where data is converging. This would make your data universal.

[xxformat_com]

I don't have the explanation.

I can just share with you that I also have that kind of message when using dbms=xlsx with proc import.

I don't have the message

• when using the xlsx engine in the libname statement or
• when using dbms=excel with proc import.

The value for of my global encoding option is UTF-8.

Current version: 9.04.01M5P091317

[Tom]

SAS datasets have two types of variables.  Floating point numbers and fixed length character strings. When you convert a XLSX file the columns that SAS guesses should be convert to character variables will be. 

So you can just ignore that message.  The programmer at SAS that wrote that was confused.