Late to the party!   This is because an invisible warning box of 'File is already open by other users. You'll have to open it as read-only...' comes first. Such a warning box prevents SAS from launching the Excel Engine. To solve it, simple do the following:   1) Run the MS Excel application in your local computer. You do not have to open any excel file, not even the file contains data to be imported.  2)Run your SAS Proc Import program.   You'll see that indeed SAS opens the source excel file in the EXCEL application, and import data into the target data set.   The only trouble is that you'll have to close the excel file and the EXCEL application by yourself. It sounds like after importing from the source file, SAS does not even bother to close it.      ... View more