Adding titles and footnotes to Excel files created using SAS

14th August 2023

Using the Excel and ExcelXP destinations in the Output Deliver System (ODS), SAS can generate reports as XLSX workbooks with one or more worksheets. Recently, I was updating a SAS Macro that created one of these and noticed that there were no footnotes. The fix was a simple: add to the options specified on the initial ODS Excel statement.

ods excel file="&outdir./&file_name..xlsx" options(embedded_titles="yes" embedded_footnotes="yes");

Notice in the code above that there are EMBEDDED_TITLES and EMBEDDED_FOOTNOTES options. Without both of these being set to YES, no titles or footnotes will appear in a given worksheet even if they have been specified in a program using TITLE or FOOTNOTE statements. In my case, it was the EMBEDDED_FOOTNOTES option that was missing, so adding that set things to rights.

The thing applies to the ExcelXP tag set as you will find from a code sample that SAS has shared on their website. That was what led me to the solution to what was happening in the Excel ODS destination in my case.

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Adding titles and footnotes to Excel files created using SAS

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