Apologies firstly for being a bit vague but my colleagues are having problems importing an Excel 5.0/7.0 file into SAS using the IMPORT WIZARD.

Whilst most variables import to the most appropriate format (character, numeric and date), others do not. Some numeric and date variables become character formatted variables in SAS. However, tabulating these variables wrongly formatted in SAS reveals no observations that cannot be thought of as numeric. The incorrectly imported date variables are in the form of Excel date values (ie 234562, that is numbers) but are given character formats. It is though SAS is seeing something in these exclusively numeric variables as non-numeric, something that we cannot see. We have checked the formatting in Excel and this seems fine (supported by the fact that SAS is importing the Excel dates as character formatted numbers [if you see what I mean]).

A further point that confuses us is that converting the Excel file into an Excel2000 format solves some of the problems but in others gives all observations in problem variables missing values.

We are running v8.2 on W2000.

Any thoughts on what to check would be gratefully received.

Many thanks

Brad

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Brad Manktelow Research Fellow in Medical Statistics Department of Epidemiology and Public Health University of Leicester 22-28 Princess Road West Leicester LE1 6TP

e-mail: bm18@le.ac.uk