Hi:
I think you can do a LOT with ODS. It really depends on your destination of choice and WHERE (what application) you're using to render or present the output.
For example, if you are running SAS 8 and you use ODS HTML, the output looks pretty good in Excel and Word with a simple STYLE=SASWEB change to the ODS invocation. However, in SAS 9, with the move to HTML 4.0 compliant tags, Microsoft does not play nice with HTML 4.0 -- Office much prefers either 3.2 compliant HTML tags or --better -- Microsoft HTML tags or Microsoft Spreadsheet XML tags (for Excel).
Sometimes, you have to change the style template to really go down the "pretty" road -- but again, it depends on where your output will ultimately be presented.
With PROC PRINT, PROC REPORT and PROC TABULATE, you have the chance to extensively control the colors and fonts, table attributes, etc. You will find that something that looks great in a browser might need a bit of tweaking to look better in Excel or Word or Acrobat Reader.
This is just something to test out and then open each result file in the application where you finally want to see the results. Starting with Office 97, you could open HTML files with Word and Excel. The MSOFFICE2K file is designed specifically for the kind of HTML used with Office 2000 and higher. And the EXCELXP file is designed specifically for Excel 2002 and higher (earlier versions of Excel will not open the XML). You should start with the ODS result file that looks the best in your viewing application and then start making changes from there.
As you can see, I've done a bit of header changing with PROC REPORT. If I wanted to do that same kind of header changing for the PROC FREQ, I'd have to use a different technique (Style and/or table template).
For more info on how to use ODS and PROC REPORT or ODS and style templates, the Tech Support FAQ on ODS are really, really a good place to start.
http://support.sas.com/rnd/base/topics/templateFAQ/Template.html
cynthia
[pre]
ods html3 file='c:\temp\ht3.html' style=sasweb;
ods html4 file='c:\temp\ht4.html' style=sasweb;
ods msoffice2k file='c:\temp\mso.html' style=sasweb;
ods tagsets.excelxp file='c:\temp\xp.xml' style=sasweb;
ods rtf file='c:\temp\wordproc.rtf' style=sasweb;
ods pdf file='c:\temp\adoberdr.pdf' style=sasweb;
proc report data=sashelp.shoes nowd;
column region product sales;
define region /group
style(header)={background=pink};
define product /group
style(header)={background=yellow foreground=black};
define sales/ sum;
rbreak after /summarize;
proc freq data=sashelp.shoes;
tables subsidiary;
run;
ods _all_ close;
[/pre]