Hi, you have responded to and reactivated a 7 year old posting. It would be much better for you to start a new post with your question and refer to this post. However, the answer is still the same. You don't need a "workaround", you need to adjust to the reality of using TAGSETS.EXCELXP. That ODS destination (TAGSETS.EXCELXP) does NOT, NOT, NOT create a true binary Excel file that can be imported. So your choices are: 1) create the XML file using TAGSETS.EXCELXP and manually or with a VBScript program save the file as proprietary .XLS or .XLSX 2) create the XML file using TAGSETS.EXCELXP and manually export the file to CSV format and read the CSV file back into SAS 3) create the XML file using TAGSETS.EXCELXP and use SAS XML Libname Engine with an XML Map to import the XML file back into SAS, as described in this paper http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/sugi31/115-31.pdf cynthia ... View more