It could be your hitting one of those "features" of Excel.  Could be hidden items, formatting, special characters.  It is the problem with using Excel I am afraid, its not in any sense structured or controlled, so your problem could be quite an array of issues.  Try highlighting the cells on one sheet in Excel, and then on the Home tab select the drop down arrow next to Clear.   Select each item in turn and see if anything changes on the sheet.  Also check you have no special characters anywhere.  Also check that all the items on the sheet are readable by SAS, ie, look at the dataset in the libname you create.  Any hidden rows/columns etc.  Or save yourself a headache and stop using Excel ... View more