Here's the background. I'm sorry it's so long:
I do SAS programming for 3 different projects. Each project has its own main project folder. Each main project folder contains a formats folder (which contains the format catalog), and then several other folders, each of which contains programs and datasets. I do most of my work in batch mode, so SAS is usually not open. Occasionally, though, I want to open a dataset in SAS to look at something in particular. When I do this, SAS does not know where to look for the appropriate format catalog, because the format catalogs are never in the same folder as the datasets. So I currently use an autoexec.sas file that specifies the