The problem is that HTML tables don't know the difference between a number and character, so you can't define a number as a character, unless you preprocess it and change it to a character and add a leading single quote.

If you use the V9 Excel engine SAS will write out character strings of numbers with leading zeros correctly.

hth

Paul Choate DDS Data Extraction (916) 654-2160

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Venita DePuy Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 8:14 AM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Outputting to Excel & dropping leading zeros in character field

Hi all - a quick question for a beautiful Friday day -

One of my co-workers is outputting some SAS output to Excel, via ODS html output. One required field is a county code that has values like '09009' etc. SAS drops the leading zeros. This is a key field that needs to be used in merges, etc. so we've been trying a variety of methods to get around this. The main issue being that this is something she's going to have to do a LOT, so doesn't want any extra steps in there if at all possible.

ie we've looked at outputting to a .csv or .txt file then importing into Excel - doesn't work as well as a few extra steps.

Any quick, easy solutions? We've tried just forcing Excel to recognized the fields as text not numeric, but can never get the leading zeros back.

Thanks! Venita