I've tried VER=97 and it makes no difference - the file is still smaller than when I open it in excel and resave as excel 97 and it still can't be read by the java app.
As a quick fix I've now used DDE to get SAS to use excel to open and resave in excel 97 format. It does the job but isn't ideal.
All the reading I have done seams to suggest that libname excel should create proper xls files whereas other methods just create something like HTML that can be read by excel. However there is definitely something odd going on.
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