Custom Chart Palettes in SSRS

This article is a follow up to the Cognos article on creating a custom color palette. 

Custom palettes are pretty common when companies start to standardize their corporate image across all company communications.

1. Make a copy of your report template.
2. Name it ‘MyCorp Chart Report’
3. In the report area, add a chart
4. Right-Click the chart object and choose Properties
5. For Palette, choose ‘Custom’
   
6. In the properties window, not find the custom palette settings.
   
7. A dialog box appears that allows you to select each color to include in the custom palette.   Below I have set the first color in the palette using RGB codes to match the purple logo for Cognitive Information.   You can also click the elipses to use the color picker or color wheel.
8. Once you click ‘OK’ the new palette is applied to the sample chart.

If you change the chart type,  it will keep the custom color palette.   If you copy the chart object, it will also keep the custom palette.

To copy your new custom palette to other charts and not loose more minutes of your life to the tedium of picking colors, go to the code view.

Search and find <ChartCustomPaletteColors>.   
Copy the folowing section to other reports as needed.   
The code for the color palette above:

        <Palette>Custom</Palette>
        <ChartCustomPaletteColors>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>#43057a</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>Yellow</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>Plum</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>Orange</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>SlateBlue</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>LightGreen</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>HotPink</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>Blue</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
          <ChartCustomPaletteColor>DarkGreen</ChartCustomPaletteColor>
        </ChartCustomPaletteColors>

If this has been helpful, let me know.

References:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd239399.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd239355.aspx

Update: This article got saved away as a ‘draft’ for way too long.   I updated both articles and I finally hit Publish.