About Styles and Style Elements

ODS styles control the default color schemes and visual attributes for a graph. The style contains information about the various fonts used for different textual parts for the graph, such as titles, footnotes, and axis labels. The style also contains information about colors, marker shapes and sizes, line patterns, and so on. Styles are designed to create an aesthetic and effective graph that conveys information clearly and without clutter.

SAS supplies a set of predefined styles that can be used with the graphs. You can apply different styles to your graph to achieve different effects. You can also create your own custom styles. In ODS Graphics Designer, you can create styles by using the interactive Graph Style Editor.

ODS styles consist of style elements, and each style element has its own attributes. Within a given style, the style elements give you more granular control of a graph's visual elements.

You can change the style element that is assigned to a graph component in a particular graph. For example, GraphTitleText is the default style element for a title. To change the properties of a title, you can assign a different style element. This feature enables you to obtain a different look for the title without changing the applied style. For more information, see Specifying Style Elements for Text Properties and Specifying Style Elements for Plot Properties.

You can override an attribute of a style element. For example, if you want the title text to be blue for your graphs, you can explicitly set the color to blue. However, you must make this change for every graph. Instead, you can change the definition of the style element itself and set its color to blue. To do this, use the Graph Style Editor to make the change and save your change as a custom style. Then you can apply the custom style to your graphs, or make the custom style the default style for all new graphs.