Understanding Styles

ODS styles are produced from compiled STYLE templates written in PROC TEMPLATE style syntax. An ODS style template is a collection of style elements that provides specific visual attributes for your SAS output.

The style elements of a style are designed to ensure the goals of effective graphics. Each style element is a named collection of style attributes such as color, marker symbol, line style, font face, as well as many others. Each graphical element of a plot, such as a marker, a bar, a line or a title, derives its visual attributes from a specific style element from the active style.

Changing the style for an ODS destination is the easiest way to change a graph's appearance. Changing the current style requires only the use of the STYLE= option on an ODS destination statement. For more information, see Specify a Style for an ODS Destination.

Every ODS output destination has a default style associated with it. These default styles are different for each destination. Therefore, your output might look different depending on which destination you use. For example, the default style for the PRINTER destination is “Printer” while the default style for the RTF destination is “RTF”.

You can display a list of the available styles by submitting the following PROC TEMPLATE statements:

proc template;
   list styles;
run;

You can change the default style for a destination by modifying the SAS Preferences or the SAS Registry.

SAS ships a set of styles that have been designed by GUI experts to address the needs of different situations, while ensuring the principles of effective graphics.

You can view the styles that SAS provides by using the command line or the SAS Windowing Environment.

SAS provides styles that are recommended for use with statistical graphics. Each of the following graphs was created using the HTML destination with a different style.