"Kevin Myers" <kevinmyers@austin.rr.com> wrote in message news:190042e5.42e51900@texas.rr.com... > Hello, > > Still working on some macros that use DDE to communicate with Excel, and would prefer to implement them in a manner that is oblivious to step and/or data step statement boundaries. Because of that, I tried to change the macro implemtations that I posted previously to use the filename() function via %sysfunc(), rather than using the filename statement. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get this to work. > > The following statement works: > filename _XLClose dde "excel|&filePath[&fileName]&sheetName!R1C1:R1C1"; > > While the following does not: > %let rc=%sysfunc(filename(_XLClose,excel|&filePath[&fileName]&sheetName!R1C1:R1C1 ,dde)); > > Both &rc and &sysfilrc are 0, but subsequent attempts to use my _XLClose filref indicate that it is not assigned, as does the value returned from %sysfunc(fexist(_XLClose)). I also tried enclosing the dde path in %str() with no change in behavior. > > Shouldn't using the filename() function work interchangeably with using the filename statement? Can anyone see something that I'm doing wrong here? > > Thanks, > s/KAM