Really useful!!
Unfortunately on a recent contract we were using SAS on a locked down Citrix environment where we weren't able to change the locale of the session (we couldn't get to the config file).

I was able to use the Unicode function to work the data, despite the fact that we couldn't view the actual text. There are some really powerful encoding related facilities in SAS - the KCVT function for changing the encoding of a specific field for one!