ods and writing (statistical) reports

[vstorme]

Dear SAS users,

I am looking for a straightforward way to turn my statistical analyses into reports, containing summary tables, graphs and text. I am overwhelmed by papers on the ODS but I do not quite find what I need. I found the papers SAS1798-2018 quite useful, but I would also like to include text and graphs. Then there are the papers ods layout combined with ods pdf. I find the articles where you need to make changes with the proc template too cumbersome. It seems that there is much more overhead needed in SAS to make nice reports compared to the R markdown possibilities. I am really fond of SAS and hope that there is something out there that I did not discover so far.

Any suggestions? 

Thanks,

Veronique

[RW9]

So what exactly is the question?  You use ODS plus a reporting procedure of your choice to present output.  How that is done depends totally on your process, required outputs, inputs etc.  If you have a complicated output, then the coding to present the complicated output will be complicated.  Proc template is a full template language with which you can create styles, tables, graphs etc.  It maybe that in R someone else already provides libraries which do some work towards what you want, but end of the day a complicated output is going to require some work.

[vstorme]

The information is very scattered around. For example there is ods rtf that you can use with proc odstext, but then there is also ods tagsets.rtf with ods tagsets.rtf text = to add text. Then there is ods layout for rtf and ods layout for pdf. 

I am using mainly following workflow: a proc freq, descriptive statistics with proc tabulate, then graphs, then some statistical model where I want to add the diagnostics panel and tables with lsmeans and contrast statements results and then some text with the used methodology and interpretation of the results. The latest that I tried was ods tagsets.rtf. I played around with the rtf mark-up language and switched then to styles in the form of "^S={ }. It;s difficult to find for example how to change margins, I first changed it in the template, then I found that there is also an ODS option for it. Changing vertical spaces between graphs and texts. Getting titles and captions beneath graphs does also not seem easy, and to obtain a table of contents, you must first open the rtf and click to get actually the title. To find out all these, I had to read already a lot of SAS papers and I still did not find the solutions that I need. Generally I find my way in the user guide, the SAS papers and the blogs, except for this.