Advantages of ODS

ODS gives you formatting options and makes procedure output much more flexible. With ODS, you can easily create output in a variety of formats, including

• HTML output.
  
  

  Obs	ID	Name	Fee
  1	2458	Murray, W	85.20
  2	2462	Almers, C	124.80
  3	2501	Bonaventure, T	149.75
  4	2523	Johnson, R	149.75
  5	2539	LaMance, K	124.80
  6	2544	Jones, M	124.80

  
  

• an output data set of procedure results.
  
  
  
  
• traditional SAS listing output.
  
  
  

Also, ODS holds your output in its component parts (data and table definition) so that numerical data retains its full machine precision.

Let's see how ODS creates output.