Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond

Controlling the Layout of the Output

This example shows you ways of using statements other than PUT _ODS_ to create ODS output in the DATA step. These additional ODS features can control the layout and appearance of the outputthrough the use of column pointer control and conditional SAS language programming logic.

The meaning of "column pointer control" with ODS and the DATA step differs from the classic report-writing DATA step where SAS writes a value to a particular print position. With ODS and theDATA step, "column pointer control" refers to a tabular column in the output and not the literal character position in the row. For example, consider the following FILE PRINT ODS statementwritten in the style we saw in the previous example.

file ...