Hi SAS Users, I'd like to import some xls data into SAS. First of all, I use VBA to specify all the xls columns as text. Then I use PROC IMPORT to read the data into SAS. But SAS seems to be mistakenly reading some columns as numeric. My SAS version is 9.4. My data look like the following. All columns are text in xls. SAS reads V1 and V101 as character variable, but read V115-V117 as numeric variables. I thought PROC IMPORT just takes whatever is given in the raw data. Why is it overriding? I carried out the same exercise in Stata. Any idea will be appreciated. Thanks. V1 V101 V115 V116 V117 763  United Kingdom                                                                                                                                                     764 Switzerland 4911 United Kingdom 34850 34880 0 4914 United States 64138 United States 4915 United States ... View more

Hi SAS Users, I have a bunch of xls files (too many for manual adjustment). I want to read them into SAS with the types of all columns being character. And I also would like to force all the columns to have the same length, say $5000. Within each xls, I have 60 columns, so i'd prefer programming to manual change. My SAS programming skill is intermediate I would say. And according to my knowledge, neither PROC IMPORT nor the LIBNAME excel engine can easily achieve this. Is DATA step my best option? Anybody any help? Thanks. ... View more