The following error message might appear when you use Base SAS to open a SAS data set that was created with SAS Enterprise Guide:

ERROR: The value (variablename) is not a valid SAS name.

The problem occurs because the VALIDVARNAME=ANY system option is the default in SAS Enterprise Guide, but VALIDVARNAME=V7 is the default in Base SAS. This means that variable names containing special characters such as the hyphen character (-) or other characters can be created with SAS Enterprise Guide.

To circumvent the problem, specify the following OPTIONS statement when you open these data sets with Base SAS:

options validvarname=any;