Well, technically you are not reading an Excel file; you are reading a comma-separated values (CSV) file that you might have created from Excel. If you did a "Save as" from Excel, this is just a plain old text file that is a copy of the rows and columns that were in your spreadsheet. Just remember that it is just a copy; if you change the data in the spreadsheet it will not be changed in the CSV file. Of course, it can be confusing because Excel will open the CSV file and display it as a worksheet. That's just Excel trying ot be helpful. If all you have is a file with this "csv" file type, it's just a plain text file. It would only be a real Excel workbook if you did a "Save as" and chose to save it as an Excel workbook. As before, this would just make a separate copy into a completely different file (with a file type of "xls" or "xlsx" depending on the version of Excel you saved it as.. And SAS doesn't really have a preference. If you have SAS Access to PC File Formats licensed and installed on your PC, SAS can read the Excel spreadsheet directly. The particular problem you ran into is very common. The "default" record length for external files is only 256 characters. I wish SAS would change it generally to avoid this problem but I suppose they have some reason not to do so. The other thing you could do is add this statement to your "autoexec.sas" file: options lrecl=32000; That will change the option for all your SAS sessions, in case you forget to add it to your INFILE statement. I do that myself.
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