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Understanding and Customizing SAS Output: The Output Delivery System (ODS)

Understanding ODS Output Formats and Destinations

The Output Delivery System (ODS) enables you to produce output in a variety of formats that you can easily access. ODS removes responsibility for formatting output from individual procedures and from the DATA step. The procedure or DATA step supplies the data and the table definition, which contains formatting instructions for the output.

The following figure illustrates the concept of output for SAS Version 8. The data and the table definition form an output object, which creates the type of ODS output that you specified in the table definition.

Model of the Production of ODS Output

[Model of the Production of ODS Output]

The following definitions describe the terms in the preceding figure:

data

Each procedure that supports ODS and each DATA step produces data, which contains the results (numbers and characters) of the step in a form similar to a SAS data set.

table definition

The table definition is a set of instructions that describes how to format the data. This description includes but is not limited to the following items:

  • the order of the columns

  • text and order of column headings

  • formats for data

  • font sizes and font faces

output object

ODS combines formatting instructions with the data to produce an output object. The output object, therefore, contains both the results of the procedure or DATA step and information about how to format the results. An output object has a name, a label, and a path.

Note:   Although many output objects include formatting instructions, not all of them do. In some cases the output object consists of only the data.  [cautionend]

ODS destinations

An ODS destination specifies a specific type of output. ODS supports a number of destinations, including the following:

RTF

produces output that is formatted for use with Microsoft-Word.

Output

produces a SAS data set.

Listing

produces traditional SAS output (monospace format).

HTML

produces output that is formatted in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). You can access the output on the web with your web browser.

Printer

produces output that is formatted for a high-resolution printer. An example of this type of output is a PostScript file.

ODS output

ODS output consists of formatted output from any of the ODS destinations.

For detailed information about ODS, see SAS Output Delivery System: User's Guide.

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