Copy data and column names from SAS Enterprise Guide

While I've often written about how to get your SAS data to Microsoft Excel in some automated way, I haven't really addressed what's probably the most frequently used method: copy and paste. SAS Enterprise Guide 7.1 added a nifty little feature that makes copy-and-paste even more useful.

The new "Copy with headers" feature creates a tab-delimited version of your selected data cells, complete with a heading row that includes the column names. This is very convenient for copying into a new Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or other table structure (like a Google Docs spreadsheet). Note: this is different than the "copy data attributes" tip that I published a while back. That tip captures the column properties, but not the actual data values.

To get started, simply select the data that you want within the SAS Enterprise Guide data grid. The data cells must be contiguous, but you don't need to select all columns or all cells within the data set. With the selection active, right-click and select Copy with headers.

This action places the data values in tab-delimited form onto the Windows clipboard. The first line of the data will be the SAS variable names from your selected data. If you paste this into a text editor that shows a view of "special characters", you can see the tabs along with the end-of-line delimiters.

When you paste the same content into Microsoft Excel, the Excel application knows how to automatically distribute these values into distinct columns. That's just what spreadsheet programs do.

Microsoft Excel isn't the only app that can handle tab-delimited data in this way. You can paste the content into a Google Doc spreadsheet too.

Or, you could simply paste into a text file as-is, and then save that file to read into a SAS program at a later time, bringing it full circle.