Hi, Juan:
You might find this previous forum posting to be useful. It had an example of how to reduce "very wide" reports.
http://support.sas.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=414ƞ
One suggestion for your particular needs is to see whether there is a "Narrow" version of the font that you are using for the report and switch to that.
Another style attribute to explore is cellspacing -- depending on what you want to do, cellspacing also affects the amount of space between each cell. Think of cellpadding as being the "white" space around your value in a data cell and cellspacing as being the space around the 4 sides of the data cell itself. Remember to be careful when you specify your value units for cellpadding and cellspacing. For RTF, I believe that your units of measure -- whatever they are -- are translated to TWIPS (twentieths of a printers point) -- because that's what RTF uses. So the number you provide in inches or points or pixels is undergoing some transformation in order to conform with this RTF specification.
Your observation is correct that cellpadding (like cell spacing) affects all 4 edges/areas -- top, bottom, left, and right -- of the cells in a table.
If you do not find a font/cellpadding/cellspacing combination that makes your RTF report look the way you want, then the other thing to explore is whether the indent= style attribute or the leftmargin= style attribute might help indent the text in the cell a bit. But I would not fiddle with those until you had first explored the other options (as they could affect cell value alignment -- possibly making centered values look not centered, etc).
More complicated is exploring whether there's an RTF control string that would affect the table spacing. This is a slightly risky approach, as RTF is very fussy about matching { and } and having the \ctrl-str in the right places. If you don't get the RTF syntax right, you can corrupt the RTF file to the point that Word will not open it.
For either of these last 2 approaches, you'd have to turn to Tech Support for help, although there were some forum postings on RTF control strings that you might be able to find by searching the forum.
cynthia
** Updated to add this information:
Also, there are some "preproduction" features in ODS that you can try. They include style attributes for setting widths and borders on each of the 4 edges of the cell separately, as described here:
http://support.sas.com/rnd/base/topics/odsrtf/rtf901.html
and they were specifically designed for RTF -- so they're worth a try.