I know someone who used this utility: https://github.com/BioStatMatt/sas7bdat to convert sas tables to other formats through R (http://www.r-project.org/) AppDev Studio is mainly for developing Applications that use SAS/IT and SCL to run processes in SAS in their background.  If you wanted to go through the substanstial dev path to do such a thing you could accomplish your goals, but it is a pretty lofty scheme to do something so simple to accomplish with SAS itself. Eslink is a sort of homebrew version of the SAS Enhanced Viewer (which is build on the eclipse platform also, btw...) My real recommendation would be to follow Cynthia's plan. Create a batch program, it will take a file and convert it through sas to a given format, then open the converted file.  Then you can change the filetype association for sas7bdat from SAS to your batch program. ... View more