There are many times where folks in my organization will create standardized excel templates (with column and row headers and particular cell formats) and, prior to migration to SAS GRID, would use SAS with DDE to populate those templates. Post grid transition, we utilize SAS IML with R (the openxlsx and XLConnect R packages) to mimic DDE functionality but it would be great if SAS could natively support the following:
I would like to see an option with the ODS EXCEL destination to:
-write to an existing excel file
-but preserve the formats that exist in the file
ODS EXCEL file=".../.xlsx" replace=NO formats=YES;
or something like that.
(I know that there are recommendations for changing development processes such as by moving to VBA and Excel to pull data from SAS that would require substantial training to get 400+ people understanding yet another language. We also have to support thousands of legacy programs that are really not amenable to a process that requires a radical restructuring of how excel files are created. )
