Hooking Up SAS and Excel - Part 6 - Proc Export and Import - by Colin Harris - Knoware

This is the sixth technique in the series on "Hooking up SAS and Excel.", using Proc Export to get data from SAS into Excel.

Proc Export - What is this technique? What it allows you to do is a run a procedure that does a very simple job. It simply takes a SAS table and creates an Excel file from that SAS table. As well as creating Excel files it also allows you to create files of other types as well: flat files, comma separated files, Lotus files, dBase files... a range of different file formats.

What type of technique is it? It's a SAS push, so SAS is controlling the interface, you're running SAS code and that generates the file that it goes across and picked up by Excel. It's data that's being transferred, that is, it's a SAS table that's being transferred as opposed to a procedure output that is being transferred - so it's purely the data.

What is it creating? What it's good for? It's good for creating Excel spreadsheets but with no formatting; it's just purely taking the data across and creating a plain and simple Excel spreadsheet.

That's one of the things it's good for but it's also good for updating simple preformatted Excel spreadsheets. Now this is the first technique in the series that has allowed us to update an existing Excel spreadsheet. What the advantage of that is that you may have a formatted spreadsheet that you have customized, you've got some nice headings on there, some changes of fonts, some graphs perhaps, some other things in there and it allows that formatting to be kept in place and for you to update that spreadsheet with some updated data.

http://knoware.co.nz