Chapter 6. Enhancing Reports with ODS

Once you understand how to program your reports, you can explore enhancing and modifying the output by adding ODS features. The previous examples in this book sent output to the LISTING destination and did not require ODS formatting features. (Example 4.3 created data sets from ODS output objects, but did not format the report using ODS features.)

The LISTING destination is the traditional monospace SAS output, and it is the default destination when you start your SAS session. Even though the examples previous to this chapter did not explicitly invoke ODS, they did use ODS to send output to the default LISTING destination.

This chapter takes advantage of ODS features to format the output produced by several of the examples in the previous chapters and to send the output from these examples to nonlisting destinations. Most examples send output to the RTF destination, with a few sent to the HTML destination. When you specify an ODS destination, you tell SAS to produce specific types of output.

Unless the example explicitly references a style, the example uses the style definition that is specified in the SAS registry subkey associated with the destination. For example, the default definition for the RTF destination is STYLES.RTF, which is found in SASHELP.TMPLMST.