Overview of ODS Destinations

The Output Delivery System (ODS) manages all output created by procedures and enables you to display the output in a variety of forms, such as HTML, PDF, RTF, and others. ODS destinations are useful in many ways. For example, you might specify the RTF destination and then copy and paste graph output from the viewer into a Microsoft Word document or a Microsoft PowerPoint slide.

Here is the basic syntax for the statement:

The ODS statement is global and can be used anywhere in your program. You can use the statements to open and close an ODS destination. For example:

ods listing;
. . . SAS statements . . .
ods listing close;

For creation of ODS graphs, a valid ODS destination must be open. On Windows and UNIX operating systems, when using the SAS windowing environment, HTML is the default destination. The default destination for batch mode is LISTING.

You can use ODS destination statement options to specify where you want your output to be displayed and where you want your image files to be stored.

For example, the ODS HTML statement below specifies the following:

ods html file="BoxPlot-Body.html"
      gpath="C:\myfiles\images" style=journal;

. . . SAS statements . . .

In summary, ODS destination statements provide many options for controlling your output. When used with the ODS GRAPHICS statement, these ODS features enable you to customize even more aspects of your graphical output.