I see advantage to having cosmetic and fixed content of a spreadsheet managed by business users who are familiar with excel and its formattling capability. The variable content for the final spreadsheet output is likely based on a back-end database and SAS expertise need to be engaged only when logic for computing the variable content changes. I am findimng that the option for saving worksheet as an XML and using SAS or unix Script to substitute the variable conent works well for summary information (25-50 summary statistics). I coded the cells in XML spreadsheet as Chgvar1, Chgvar2,..., etc. Assuming that XML itself is unlikely to have these literals, I can substituite these programatically with computed values in Unix. On the other hand, if the variable content is big or changing from run to run (say list of all customers meeting a certain criteria), the approach breaks down. If there is a better way for handling such situations, I will like to find out about it.
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