Thank you. First, it is business decision to go ahead using SAS to replace Excel, one by one, tab by tab. Your opinion or my opinion does not count. I actually believe it is great direction to go at this moment. The numbers match with Excel outcome, with several hundred SAS macro variables. It has cost too much time/effort, some embarrassment on me albeit. I concur that back in, say, 2002, perhaps using SAS to replace Excel was generally wrong/bad idea. This is 2022. SAS is much better, more open to work TO/FROM other packages. I used to use DDE, for example, to work with SAS, <Y2K. Now this sounds such a long bygone. Second, I wish I have the liberty to disclose the log and HTML details that show my now notorious original post worked, for a while of 2 days. Not to start debate, but your NEVER statement does have exceptions, practically. As wisdom goes, never say NEVER. A bit more background, as I am allowed to: we run long SAS prep code (long-running jobs) that pulls, cleans, organizes the data fed into the spreadsheets. Years ago we decided to continue the subsequent analysis using Excel not SAS, half a dozen reasons I recall. Today is time of WFH. Excel is not working as it used to in this new, remote setting. Clipboard, for example, is constantly under pressure to work properly, thanks partially to corporate security.... Many linked formula sometimes automatically update, sometimes this-some automatically that-some don't,, vice versa. We spend a lot manpower to check, double-check, just to avoid misjudging people's quality of work, attitude.... So we return to the glory of SAS. If the users are all SAS savvy, I could live with my rough version one as is. To accommodate not-that-savvy users, I need to polish up quick a bit. One big benefit as I see at this moment is SAS output is so much closer to Excel-readable, especially if using SAS Studio.
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