@Tom It seems that SAS uses Microsoft Access Connectivity Engine (ACE) to access these files.
They probably wanted to avoid dealing with the jungle of the undocumented MS Office file formats.
Excerpt:
If you are working with Microsoft Excel data, you can use one of the two SAS DBMS identifiers that have no dependency on the Microsoft ACE components.
You can use the DBMS=XLSX identifier with the IMPORT or EXPORT procedures and a LIBNAME statement (depending on your SAS release). Or, you can use the DBMS=XLS identifier with PROC IMPORT and PROC EXPORT.
No mention of ODS.
@Sas_Act_114 The same page also addresses the issue of 32-Bit SAS is installed with 64-Bit Microsoft Office
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