Templates are members of a SAS item store and are not portable across operating systems. This limitation includes 32-bit to 64-bit operating system changes. Therefore, styles, tables, and tagsets generated by PROC TEMPLATE on 32-bit sessions are not directly accessible in SAS sessions running on 64-bit operating systems. If you attempt to reference an item store from a previous SAS release, or from a SAS session running on a different operating system, one of the following might occur, depending on the SAS release trying to access the item store:

• Not all of the features of the customized style, table, or tagset will be used. No errors or warnings are generated, but the output that is generated might not pick up the margins, fonts, or colors specified in the customized style, table, or tagset template(s).


• One of the following warnings might be generated:

  WARNING: libref.template-store is not a template store! It will be ignored.
  
  
  WARNING: '<Style, table or tagset name>' was compiled using a different version of SAS. 
           This might result in unexpected behavior.
  

To make templates available on another operating system or a more recent SAS release, save the source code from the original SAS session and recompile the templates on the target operating system. You can do this by using PROC TEMPLATE with the SOURCE statement on the originating SAS session to save the templates to a file and run them on the target platform.

/* Set the STORE= option to the libref.template-store
   that needs to be copied. */
proc template;
   source / file="file.sas" store=sasuser.templat;
run;

Prior to SAS^® 9.2, the code in FILE.SAS needs to be edited as follows in the target SAS session:

• Add a PROC TEMPLATE; statement at the top of the code.
• Add a RUN; statement as the last line.

Submit the code.

The migration of ODS templates is discussed further here: Special Topic: Migrating ODS Templates.

Operating System and Release Information