As often with SAS, the answer is "for historic reasons".   Tip: For compatibility with previous releases, SAS accepts some text without quotation marks. When writing new programs or updating existing programs, always enclose text in quotation marks. Quote from http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/lrdict/64316/HTML/default/viewer.htm#a000220968.htm ... View more

Thanks for the help, that Macro looks neat!   I closed the EG file and reran it and the problem vanished, so although I've no idea what the problem was, it seems to be sorted now.   I was importing into Excel using a Data Connection that loaded the data into the Data Model, which is nothing like any of the other methods and should be far more immune to artifacts like this, as I said in my first post the issue appears to have been with EG as I could test the .csv files and see the blank row was there.    Excel was doing as I'd have expected.  It just doesn't have much control over the import, it would be helpful if there were a few more options for tidying up the files as they come in, because it's not immediately obvious how to edit the data once it's into the Data Model, at least on my version of Excel.   The most frustrating thing about this sort of thing is that I have PowerBI Pro, which is by far the best solution for what I'm doing and can correct dodgy input data.  But I have to deliver in Excel.   Oh well, it's sorted now.  Thanks again! ... View more

As other has told you, hiding doesn't really exist as a concept in this case. But if you want to remove many variables at once there are some tricks.    *Remove all variables between (and including) the variables named below; data x; set sashelp.baseball; drop nAtBat--CrBB; run; *Remove all variables starting with cr. We can use the : as a wildcard, but only "ending with".; data x; set sashelp.baseball; drop cr: ; run; *Remove all variables of one type. ; data z; set sashelp.baseball; drop _char_ ; * or use _numeric_ ; run; ... View more

Do something like:   proc sql; create table C as select mdy(dm,1,dy) as ddate format=yymms., a.age_group, counts, total, std from A inner join B on dy=year and A.age_group=B.age_group order by ddate, age_group; quit; ... View more