You can use your existing CSS with ODS. However, you probably cannot use it right out of the box, because ODS carries over the PROC TEMPLATE style elements as the CSS class names, and the class names will not match those in your CSS.

For example, much of the ODS HTML output is tagged with <td>. So the td properties are applied not just to the table cells but also to the headers, titles, and footnotes, and so on. See the table in The STYLESHEET Defaults to learn which CSS properties are assigned to the PROC TEMPLATE style elements.

In order to make your CSS classes match the output's classes, you must specify the correct class name as the argument to the HTMLCLASS= option within the appropriate STYLE statement of PROC TEMPLATE. Issue similar code for every mismatched class name in your CSS.

Here is an example: The class .Header1 for example could be a class specified in your existing CSS file to format table headings. But the output generated with SAS uses the class .Header for the table headers. Therefore, the class .Header1 is not used. Instead, the style element Header from PROC TEMPLATE is carried over into the default CSS for your ODS output. Therefore, you must reassign the class .Header to .Header1 by issuing HTMLCLASS= attribute as follows:

   proc template;
     define style styles.test;
       parent=styles.default;
       style header from header /
             htmlclass='Header1';
     end;
   run;

   ods html file="c:\temp\temp.html" stylesheet=(url="c:\temp\newcss.css");

   proc print data=ashelp.class;
   run;

   ods html close;

  

PROC TEMPLATE can be used in conjunction with an existing CSS. See Order of Precedence for an explanation of which style definitions take precedence.

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