Not sure how you are reading the data from Excel into VA, but if you use the PROC IMPORT available in SAS you will end up with strings that look like that if the column (variable) in the Excel sheet has mixed numeric (dates are stored as numbers in SAS and Excel) and character values. To pull that into a dataset SAS will need to make the variable a character string. But when it does that it just converts the numbers that Excel uses to store Date (and DateTime) values. Excel stores dates are the number of days since 1900 and time as a fraction of a day. So a datetime value looks like a number with fractional part.
If you can fix the report to not put character strings into any of the cells in the column with the datetime values then SAS should read it as a number and convert the value for you.
If you cannot then you will need to derive a new variable, since you cannot change the type of a variable from character to numeric.
SAS code like this should work. Not clear to me how to do that in VA.
data want;
set have;
date_var = dhms(input(char_var,32.)+'30DEC1899'd,0,0,0);
format date_var datetime20.;
run;
... View more