Microsoft® SQL Server® Reporting Services Recipes: for Designing Expert Reports

Part III. Chart and Gauge Reports

• Chart Custom Color Palette

• Chart Keywords

• Column Chart with Goal Threshold Line

• Creating a Personal Report Card

• Customizing Gauges with Images

• Exception Highlighting with Gauges/Bullet Graphs

• Grouped Pie Chart Slices

• Growing Bar and Column Charts

• Histogram Chart

• Linear Regression Line

• Creating a Multi-Series Multi Y-Axis Chart

• Pareto Chart

CHART CUSTOM COLOR PALETTE

Charts use built-in predefined color palettes with 10 to 16 distinct colors. Starting with Reporting Services 2000 Service Pack 1 (SP1), you can override the default colors. To specify color values as constant or expression-based values, click the Series Style button on the appearance properties for the data value in the Edit Chart Value dialog box. You could use this, for instance, to highlight values based on a certain condition such as a minimum or maximum value within the current series.

If you don't want to define a full custom color palette, you can override the color for individual data points. Use an expression that either returns a specific color value (in order to override) or returns "Nothing," which will pick the current color from the underlying built-in color palette.

For example, suppose you want to highlight in red all data point values with negative y-values. For all the other data points, you want to apply the default colors. To do this, you would select Edit the data value and click the Appearance tab. Next you would click the Series Style button, which opens the Style Properties ...