SAS Institute Inc. SAS/STAT 9.2 User’s Guide: Statistical Graphics Using ODS (Book Excerpt)

SAS Publishing, 2008. – 176 p. – ISBN: 9781607643548Effective graphics are indispensable for modern statistical analysis. They reveal patterns, differences, and uncertainty that are not readily apparent in tabular output. Graphics provoke questions that stimulate deeper investigation, and they add visual clarity and rich content to reports and pre- sentations.
In earlier SAS releases, creating graphs with statistical procedures typically required additional programming steps such as creating output data sets with the values to plot, modifying these data sets with a DATA step program, and using traditional SAS/GRAPH procedures to produce the plots.
SAS 9.2 eliminates the need for additional programming by providing new functionality, referred to as ODS Statistical Graphics (or ODS Graphics for short). ODS Graphics is an extension of ODS (the Output Delivery System). ODS manages procedure output and lets you display it in a variety of destinations, such as HTML and RTF. With ODS Graphics, statistical procedures now produce graphs as automatically as they produce tables, and graphs are now integrated with tables in the ODS output. ODS Graphics is available in procedures in SAS/STAT, Base SAS, SAS/ETS, SAS/QC, SAS/GRAPH, and other products (see the section Procedures That Support ODS Graphics on page 528). Note that SAS/GRAPH software is required for ODS Graphics functionality.Getting Started with ODS Statistical Graphics
A Primer on ODS Statistical Graphics
Syntax
Selecting and Viewing Graphs
Graphics Image Files
Graph Size and Resolution
ODS Graphics Editor
The Default Template Libraries and the ODS PATH
Graph Templates
Statistical Graphics Procedures
Examples of ODS Statistical Graphics