A Primer on ODS Statistical Graphics

You invoke ODS Graphics by specifying the following statement:

   ods graphics on;

ODS Graphics remains in effect for all procedure steps until you turn it off with the following statement:

   ods graphics off;

See the section Syntax for details about the more commonly used ODS GRAPHICS statement options. Once you have invoked ODS Graphics, creating graphical output with procedures is as simple as creating tabular output. You can use control your output in the following ways:

• ODS destination statements (such as ODS HTML or ODS RTF) specify where you want your graphs displayed. See Figure 21.13 for an example of HTML output. See the section ODS Destination Statements for a list of the supported destinations. See the section Syntax for details about the more commonly used ODS destination statement options.

• ODS SELECT and ODS EXCLUDE statements select and exclude graphs from your output. See the section Selecting and Excluding Graphs for an example of how to select graphs.

• ODS OUTPUT statements create SAS data sets from the data object used to make the plot. See the section Specifying an ODS Destination for Graphics for an example.

• Procedure options specify which graphs to create. For each procedure, these options are described in the "Syntax" section of the procedure chapter. Typically, you use the PLOTS= option to control all graphs. The available graphs are listed in the "ODS Graphics" section, which is found in the "Details" section of each procedure chapter. Many graphs are produced by default.

• ODS styles control the general appearance and consistency of all graphs and tables. See the sections Graph Styles and Styles for more information about styles.

• ODS templates modify the layout and details of each graph. See the section Graph Templates for more information about templates.

  Note:A default template is provided by SAS for each graph, so you do not need to know anything about templates to create statistical graphics.

You can also access individual graphs, control the resolution and size of graphs, and modify your graphs (as explained in the sections beginning with Selecting and Viewing Graphs). Alternatively, you can use special statistical graphics procedures to create custom graphs directly (see the section Statistical Graphics Procedures).