Maybe the intention is to replicate the styles found in the Excel sheet when writing the processed data with SAS to a suitable ODS destination.
More than 10 years ago I managed to read the text color from Excel sheets via DDE, but that was very complicated (to figure out). I could imagine that, depending on the file format (especially xlsx), more recent techniques would facilitate access to Excel's formatting information, but I'm not sure. PROC IMPORT is definitely inappropriate for this task.
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