Rich Text Format RTF Output

RTF stands for Rich Text Format, which is Microsoft s open markup language for defining the content of documents. If you have an RTF file, simply clicking on it within a Microsoft Windows environment causes Microsoft Word or WordPad to open the file. There are several ways to create RTF files, and thus Microsoft Word files, with SAS. 

Turning on the SAS ODS RTF destination is the easiest way to send your SAS output to an RTF file. With the following SAS code you can create an RTF file  

Note that adding these two shaded lines of code to your SAS procedure gives you an attractive RTF file. If you do not like the default ODS style template that SAS uses for your output, you can use a different style template supplied by SAS by specifying the STYLE= option in the ODS RTF statement. If you still do not like the way your RTF file looks, you can define your own ODS style template with PROC TEMPLATE. Finally, PROC REPORT allows you to define formatting elements within the SAS procedure itself, where you can customize the appearance of almost any element on the page. For more information about ODS, you can refer to the SAS Press books Output Delivery System The Basics, by Lauren Haworth, and Quick Results with the Output Delivery System, by Sunil Gupta. If you just want more style templates to choose from, you can investigate the templates created by Bernadette Johnson in Instant ODS Style Templates for the SAS Output Delivery System. 

Although ODS RTF provides a convenient and efficient way to create attractive SAS output, it has a couple of drawbacks  

Besides ODS RTF, there are several other ways to create attractive RTF output from SAS. If you do an Internet search on RTF SAS macro, you will find SAS macros available that convert a rectangular data set of information into attractive proportional-font RTF files. 

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