Ok, I got it working, with the use of STAT/Transfer software that Tom mentioned. The real Excel pops up in a fraction of a second, really nice. Obviously I had to set up some scripts on both sides. STAT/Transfer cost is just $300 per machine, and it can do much more than SAS files. I wonder why SAS does not just include such converter in the basic package. ... View more

Thanks Synthia, I understand what you are saying. I know how to create Excel file in from SAS table, it takes only 4 lines of code. But I don't want to write any additional code for every dataset I need to look at. This is not for production, but for development and debugging. By the way, Eslink is not a production package at all, it is intended for development (no production environment should be under Eclipse anyway). My requirement is: in Libraries tree, I should be able to right-click on any dataset, launch external viewer, and magically see it in a spreadsheet. Without any need for extra code in the SAS program. I heard that AppDev studio is also running under Eclipse. Do you know how good it is? Can it run a session on Linux from PC, like Eslink? Does it have a good external viewer? ... View more

Thanks Tom, you gave me some useful information. We actually did notice that working files in /tmp are taking space, and even worse, they do not go away after the session is closed, they are still there and with the lock file. I guess, there should be some configuration parameter to change the place, and we also should do a cleanup from time to time. Now let me re-iterate details of how we use it here, so maybe you would have some more advice for us. The Eslink plugin under Eclipse on Windows PC is configured to connect to the Linux machine (via ssh) and run the session there. As I said before, it overall runs fine. Somehow they can bring the library files to Eslink and display the data in Eslink internal data browser (which is a pretty dumb browser). After some experiments with using my own batch script as an "external viewer", I learned that Eslink calls it with one parameter, which is a file path. If my session was local on PC, the viewer would just open it, but since my session is on Linux, I have to copy it first. This is not a big problem, can be solved with a simple wrapper (of course, I wish Eslink team fixed it, but Eslink is a free software and currently not much is going on there). By the way, I am not quite sure why you worry about reading data files produced by a running session. This is read-only operation, should not crash anything. At least on Linux, I know for sure, making a copy of a file never causes any problem, even if the file is open by a process. Anyway, the bigger problem is: after my wrapper script brings the file to PC, I need to either have a nice browser to view it, or, even better, a converter to csv or xls format, so that I can just invoke Excel. If, instead of converter on Windows, I have one on Linux, it is OK, because I can convert the file on Linux and then copy it to PC. ... View more

Sorry, I made a mistake in the file type. I meant to say sas7bdat. This is certainly the storage for the dataset. Here is the problem I am trying to solve. As I mentioned, I control SAS session from a PC. To be more exact, I am running Eslink plugin in Eclipse. Overall this thing runs fine. I can see my datasets under the "Libraries" node, and I can double-click on it to view. The problem is, that view is sort of dead picture: you cannot cut and paste, and it is also not persistent - disappears after I restart the tool. Eslink actually allows to define an external viewer for the data (with the default name "sv.exe" - I don't know what that is). I managed to figure out what an external viewer would get from Eslink as a parameter, by setting the viewer to a simple batch script. Here is what I saw: /tmp/SAS_workF9F300006A26_mcm-sas.mooncapital.corp\Curr_holdings.sas7bdat Obviously this looks like a Linux path, and the file was actually there. Note a funny mix of forward and back slashes (but this can easily be fixed by a wrapper). So this is what I am thinking: if I had a utility that converts sas7bdat file to svn or xls, I would have a wrapper (set as the viewer) which gets the file from Linux to Windows, converts it (or first converts and then gets it to Windows), and then launches Excel. I actually tried two things: 1. dsread on Windows 2. Java library named SassyReader - tried on both Windows and Linux People who suggested those things claimed that they worked for them, but for me they all failed complaining about unknown page type or something like that. I don't know why, can it be because I amusing the latest 9.3? Is it possible that file format changed? Bottom line, if anybody can tell me how to solve this issue, I would really appreciate it. ... View more