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Overview

If you read Create plots or Create charts, you saw one way of using the Output Delivery System (ODS) to create interactive graphs. You also may have seen the use of ODS styles in Tabulate data.

ODS allows you to implement and control the formatting of all SAS procedure output by providing more robust and greater variety of output destinations and formatting. ODS provides an almost limitless number of choices for reporting and displaying analytical results in visually appealing formats. You can create SAS output in a great variety of output formats such as HTML, PDF, RTF, PostScript, PCL, an array of markup languages (including HTML4 and XML), and the brand new ODS Document formats.

ODS saves you time and resources, and gives you control over the structure and hierarchy of your output. With the introduction of the new DOCUMENT procedure, you can produce multiple ODS output without rerunning your procedures or data queries. Furthermore, you can customize or modify your output hierarchy by rearranging, duplicating, or removing tables or even the entire output of procedures and data queries. In short, you control what stays in and what comes out of your document, and in what format you want to see it, without running the same procedures and data queries over and over again.

ODS provides template definitions that define the structure of the output from procedures and from the DATA step. You can customize the output by modifying these definitions or by creating your own with PROC TEMPLATE. You can use the TEMPLATE procedure to create and modify any tagsets that you selected or created for your output.

ODS processing
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This task focuses on two basic tasks using ODS: creating HTML output and creating an output data set.



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