Output Delivery System: The Basics and Beyond

Excluding the Output You Don't Want

If you're working with a procedure that produces a lot of output objects, you might find it easier to exclude the ones you don't want, rather than select all of the ones you do want. ODS provides an EXCLUDE statement in addition to the SELECT statement. The syntax is exactly the same:

ODS EXCLUDE output-object(s)-to-exclude;

To compare the two statements, let's look at a sample program. First, we'll identify our chosen output objects using the ODS TRACE statement, then we'll use the ODS SELECT statement, and last we'll repeat the program using the EXCLUDE statement.

For this example, we modify the output from the UNIVARIATE procedure to eliminate the Extreme Observations table. To code this using the SELECT ...