Using DDE to Read and Write to Excel Workbooks - Exchanging Data Between SAS and Microsoft Excel - page 169

Format 1 - FILENAME fileref DDE 'DDE-triplet' <DDE-options>;
The Item value is the last part of
the triplet.

Here the item value is “r1c1:r1c2”,
which points to two cells in
worksheet “SHEET1” (cells a1-a2).

<DDE-options> DDE Options describe additional

features and functions that apply to
the DDE Triplet. These features are
described here.

COMMAND Some systems (other DDE server

applications) may not accept the
“system” command, and this is an
alternate form of issuing commands
to the system. This is not required
for use with Excel.

HOTLINK This option opens an active link

between SAS and Excel. Every time
a cell in the Excel range is
modified, SAS can detect the
change by repeatedly checking the
Excel libref with a SAS INPUT
statement. When there are no
changes, a zero length record is
returned.

LRECL= This option specifies the length of

the DDE character string records.
The default on Windows is 256
bytes, but can be changed to be
anywhere in the range of 1 byte to 1
gigabyte-1 (1,073,741,823 bytes -
(2**30)-1),

NOTAB This keeps SAS from placing tab

characters (ascii value hex '09') in
output streams of data, and causes
SAS to ignore tabs in input streams
of data. This allows character
strings with spaces included to be
stored in a single Excel cell. When
this option is used, SAS can accept
delimiters other than a tab character
in the input data.