About the ODS Graphics Designer

The SAS ODS Graphics Designer is an interactive graphical application that you can use to create and design custom graphs. The designer creates graphs that are based on the Graph Template Language (GTL), the same system that is used by SAS analytical procedures and SAS ODS Graphics procedures. The ODS Graphics Designer provides a graphical user interface for designing graphs easily without having to know the details of templates and the GTL.

Using point-and-click interaction, you can create simple or complex graphical views of data for analysis. The ODS Graphics Designer enables you to design sophisticated graphs by using a wide array of plot types. You can design multi-cell graphs, classification panels, and scatter plot matrices. Your graphs can have titles, footnotes, legends, and other graphics elements. You can save the results as an image for inclusion in a report or as an ODS Graphics Designer file (SGD) that you can later edit.

The ODS Graphics Designer is generally used by analysts, statisticians, managers, academics, and others who want to graphically explore data or present the results of their analyses. Users do not need to know about the GTL. However, users are often knowledgeable about the DATA step and SAS/STAT procedures.

An SGD file is a graph file that has been created using the ODS Graphics Designer and that has an .sgd file extension. The file contains a description of the graph to be rendered. You can open this file in the designer and make changes to the graph. You can also render the graph to an ODS destination by using the SGDESIGN procedure.

The SGDESIGN procedure complements the ODS Graphics Designer and is used to render a graph that has been saved as an SGD file. The procedure enables you to run one or more graphs in batch mode and render the graphs to any ODS destination. You can run graphs using different variables against the same or different data.

The basic syntax of the procedure is as follows:

PROC SGDESIGN SGD='SGD-file-name' <options>;

Here is an example:

ods html file="CarsLattice.html";
   proc sgdesign sgd="C:\SGDFiles\CarsLattice.sgd";
   run;
ods html close;

You can specify a data set as an option to the procedure. By default, the procedure uses the data set that was used to create the SGD file.

For more information about the SGDESIGN procedure, see the SAS ODS Graphics: Procedures Guide.

The ODS Graphics Designer runs in Windows and UNIX operating environments only.