Apr 26, 2013

Change Chart line colour in SSRS 2008?


If you are a regular user of SSRS charts, you will know that charts use built-in predefined colour palettes. I will demonstrate this by using Line Charts which is already setup for our example. In the snapshot below, you can see that we have multiple lines each representing a series and has a unique colour. However, these colours were assigned by SSRS automatically. Some times the colours are too similar and would be hard to differentiate between them. So, it would be nice to change them with our own custom palette colours.
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To do this, you have to be in Design mode in SSRS and follow the steps below:
1. Click once on the Chart to select its properties. Make sure that you have selected the Chart – a double click on the Chart will bring Chart Data properties rather than the Chart itself.

2. If you have selected by mistake Chart Data, you can switch to Chart properties by choosing Chart from the list of object names under Properties window box:
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3. Under the Chart section in the Properties window, choose CustomPaletteColors and click on the botton to open the dialog window:
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4. Add your custom colours that you like to create your own palettes. This site will help you to choose a colour scheme (http://www.colorschemer.com/schemes/index.php):
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5. Finally, we can see that now our Chart is using the custom colours which we added rather than the predefined built-in colours:
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