Staying Relevant in a Competitive World: Using the SAS® Output Delivery System to Enhance, Customize, and Render Reports

Technology is always changing. To succeed in this ever-evolving landscape, organizations must embrace the change and look for ways to use it to their advantage. Even standard business tasks such as creating reports are affected by the rapid pace of technology. Reports are key to organizations and their customers. Therefore, it is imperative that organizations employ current technology to provide data in customized and meaningful reports across a variety of media. The SAS® Output Delivery System (ODS) gives you that edge by providing tools that enable you to package, present, and deliver report data in more meaningful ways, across the most popular desktop and mobile devices. To begin, the paper illustrates how to modify styles in your reports using the ODS CSS style engine, which incorporates the use of cascading style sheets (CSS) and the ODS document object model (DOM). You also learn how you can use ODS to customize and generate reports in the body of email messages. Then the paper discusses methods for enhancing reports and rendering them in desktop and mobile browsers by using the HTML and HTML5 ODS destinations. To conclude, the paper demonstrates the use of selected SAS ODS destinations and features in practical, real-world applications.