ERROR: Unable to open the table… (Missing Format)
1. Problem
In some programming environments, such as the SAS Windowing Environment, you may see this error message while attempting to open a SAS dataset having user specific formats.
ERROR: Unable to open the table [...]. [...] cannot be opened. Do you want to select a different table to open?
2. Example
Here is a program which create a CLASS dataset in the WORK library with $SEX as user specific character format applied on the SEX variable.
proc format;
value $ sex 'M'='Male' 'F'='Female';
run;
data class;
set sashelp.class;
format sex $sex.;
run;
proc datasets lib=work memtype=cat kill;
run;
quit;
3. Possible Solution
One easy solution is to open the dataset without using the missing formats by running beforehand the following nofmterr global option:
options nofmterr;
