The TEMPLATE procedure enables you to customize the look of your SAS output. The TEMPLATE procedure creates and modifies styles. The Output Delivery System then uses these styles to produce customized formatted output.

By default, ODS output is formatted according to the various styles that the procedure or DATA step specifies. However, you can also customize the appearance of the output by using the DEFINE STYLE statement in the TEMPLATE procedure.

By default, ODS uses styles to display the procedure or DATA step results. Modify the appearance of the output by customizing these styles. The first output that follows shows the HTML output from PROC PRINT using the default style. The second output that follows shows the same HTML output from PROC PRINT with a customized style. The default style for HTML output is Styles.HTMLBlue.

When you are working with styles, you are more likely to modify a SAS style than to write a completely new style. The next display shows the types of changes that you can make to the default style for the HTML output. The new style affects both the contents file and the body file in the HTML output. In particular, in the contents file, the style makes changes to the following attributes:

In the body file, the new style makes changes to the following attributes: