title: Importing SAS column names from Excel row
body: <p>I am trying to create a SAS table from a XLSX Excel-file which looks like below. The SAS column names will be 3rd row in the Excel file and reading data from the 5th row.</p>
  
  <pre><code>     A         B       C       D        F    ...
  1 
  2
  3   Date     Period  Rate  Rate down Rate up ... 
  4 
  5 2015-04-30   1     0.25     0.23     0.27  ...
  6 2015-05-31   2     0.21     0.19     0.23  ...
  .  .........................................
  .  .........................................
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am using <code>proc import</code> to gather the table as below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>proc import datafile = have out=want DBMS = excel; 
  GETNAMES=YES; MIXED=YES; SCANTEXT=YES; USEDATE=YES; DATAROW=5; 
  run;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The problem is that <code>Proc Import</code> takes the column names in the 3rd row in numeric format like the rest of the Excel file, so SAS puts <code>"."</code> instead of column names like <code>Date</code> or <code>Rate</code> because SAS doesn't understand them as numeric values. </p>
  
  <p>I found <code>proc import</code> options like <code>DATAROW=5</code> to read the data from the fifth row, and  <code>MIXED=YES</code> to indicate that the Excel-table include both numeric and character values. <code>GETNAMES=YES</code> to get column names from the table, and <code>SCANTEXT=YES</code> to scan text as you can understand. However, even with those options I got the same SAS table like below. The whole SAS-table is in numeric format, so it can't resolve names from Excel:</p>
  
  <pre><code>     F1     F2   F3    F4    F5   ...
  1     .      .   .     .     .    ...
  2     .      .   .     .     .    ...
  3 30APR2015  1  0.25  0.23  0.27  ...
  4 31MAY2015  2  0.21  0.19  0.23  ...
  . ...............................
  . ...............................
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any idea about how to import the 3rd row of the XLSX file as my column name in the SAS table?</p>