Please start a new thread with any new questions rather than re-opening old ones. In terms of graphs, SAS sgplot/gtl is vastly superior to Excel, and boasts the analysis backend of SAS as well.  There really is no benefit to using Excel, it is really a fact of life that its so prevalent that its used not that it is in any way better than other solutions.  Now if you compared SAS graphing to R graphing then that is a different matter, and with Shiny and such like R is far better.  But compared to a childs toy like Excel... DDE is ancient, it went out of support back before xls was removed from support so >15+.  It really shouldn't be being used in any context, as you found here, and plenty of other areas, it will not work at all. VBA is pretty cool for scripting and such like within the Office application, it is however tied to Office and Windows - thus you are limiting your options to proprietary software only available in certain places, not ideal.   Far better to learn how to create graphs using sgplot/gtl (or R), output these directly to PDF's, or to RTF, then combine them through that method. ... View more