@Vic wrote: sorry for the delay in reply. The dbsastype works fine with my SAS Base at work, but I do not use the proc import. Unfortunally it seems that dbsastype is not supported in the University Edition of SAS. Regards, Vic The DBSASTYPE is not supportted for the XLSX engine.  You can use it with the EXCEL engine (and ORACLE, TERADATA, etc). But the SAS/Universtity Edition does not support the EXCEL engine because that requires actually running Microsoft's Jet Engine software which is not available on the Unix virtual machine where SAS is running (or any Unix machine that I know of).   If you have messy data in Excel files then convert them to CSV files and write your own data step to read them. ... View more

some solutions; %symdel test date /nowarn; %let DATE = %sysfunc(intnx(day,%sysfunc(TODAY()),-1),yymmddd10.); run; %let test = %sysfunc(cat(Keep Attention)) &date; %put &test; Keep Attention 2017-03-18 %symdel test date tst /nowarn; %let DATE = %sysfunc(intnx(day,%sysfunc(TODAY()),-1),yymmddd10.); run; %let test = %sysfunc(cat(Keep Attention,'&date')); %put &test; %let tst=%sysfunc(compress(&test,%str('')));%put &tst; Keep Attention 2017-03-18 or data _null_; date=put(intnx('day',%sysfunc(TODAY()),-1),yymmddd10.); test = cat('Keep Attention' ,date); put test; run;quit; ... View more