SSRS – Chart Colours

Chart reports are one of the main report formats for most of the business users. Developing Chart reports using SSRS is always fun with its inbuilt automatic options.
Sometimes these Automatic options may give uncertainty for end-users and we will see one of the scenarios here with some sample data.

Step 1: Developed a chart report with year parameter with 3 categories and upon execution for different year we are getting different colours for same categories and results are very hard for comparison for any end-users.

Step 2: Setting the Colour options on Chart i.e. overwriting the Automatic default option with preferred colour schemes as

Step 3: On execution of the same reports for different years, users can get the comparison with consistent colour scheme as

Points to consider:

1. Discussed only a simple scenario but can also possible to overwrite any default automatic behaviour
2. Most of the times, we go with default options but changing the options really depends on the consistency of business scenarios