Hi Oleg. I realize that this post is from a previous decade but here goes anyway. I am ultimately trying to read a lot of locked Excel data into a dataset. I am using EG 8.4 and have copied the files to the server. I tried DDE since the files are copied to the server using another one of your examples but the line filename cc dde 'Excel|System'; throws this error: ERROR: Invalid device type.ERROR: Error in the FILENAME statement. So I was trying the VBA script option you mention, modified to read the file with password, unprotect it, and re-save without password. But I'm getting the error that it doesn't understand the C-shell command: /bin/bash: cscript: command not found Any suggestions? If not, I am going to just work outside of SAS. It will just be slow...
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