Date:         Tue, 30 Jan 2007 17:21:16 -0700
Reply-To:     Alan Churchill <SASL001@SAVIAN.NET>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Alan Churchill <SASL001@SAVIAN.NET>
Subject:      Re: numbers "that look like" characters in Excel to SAS
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Excel is THE most popular tool in the world for manipulating data.
Speed-wise, computers have progressed to the point that my test data now is
larger than anything I worked with back in the day. Excel 2007 will allow 1M
rows and 65K columns: hence the issue with Excel will become worse.

All that aside, people time is a helluva lot more expensive than computing
time. We, as programmers, need to handle whatever is thrown our way. Sure,
everyone could be a lot better at entering data but I can't dictate skills.
And, users prefer to work with Excel when it comes to data.

Excel needs to be managed by Excel. As soon as you go outside of Excel and
don't get the results desired, well....

Alan


Alan Churchill
Savian "Bridging SAS and Microsoft Technologies"
www.savian.net



-----Original Message-----
From: bob mcconnaughey [mailto:bobmcconn@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:28 PM
To: Alan Churchill; SAS-L@LISTSERV.VT.EDU
Subject: Re: numbers "that look like" characters in Excel to SAS

right..works great if you don't mind that reading in
data now takes about 3-4 times as long as it did when
data was simply double keyed entered raw data files.
Not to mention the innumerable ways in which project
managers, lab techs, and PIs can totally hose a
"dataset" that's in excel and have NO idea of what
they've done.

I suspect the quantity of data has increased
exponentially and the quality decreased by an equal
amount via excel.
--- Alan Churchill <SASL001@SAVIAN.NET> wrote:

> Excel works fine. It is the interface between Excel
> and everything else that
> causes a problem.
>


Bob McConnaughey
Westat/NIEHS | Pittsboro, NC

"There is a great homeland of intelligence and love from which no one can be
expelled"
Carlos Fuentes



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