SSRS 2008 color pallete change

Question

In an existing SSRS 2008 r2 report, my users that use pcs that have a Windows operating system can export their reports to excel using white and a light green color on every other detail line. These users print their reports on a black and white printer and everything is fine.

The problem is for users that work on MAC pcs. These users export their reports to excel and try to print thier reports on a black and white printer. The problem is one line is readable and the other line you can not read. The line that is suppose to be white, is the line that is you can not read.

I believe the problem is due to the color pallete for SSRS reports is different than the color palette that excel uses. I think I would need to make the color pallete that SSRS uses the same as excel uses. Is this a possible solution for every other print line in one SSRS report? If I use the custom colors for this SSRS report, will that also modify other SSRS reports that are generated on the same report server?

Thus can you show me how to change the color pallete that ssrs uses so that it matches the color pallete excel uses? Also if you have other suggestions on how to solve these problem, please let me know what your solution is along with code and/or urls that will tell me how to solve this problem.

Answer 1

I can't comment on the use of SSRS reports exported to Excel on a Mac, however in general SSRS 2008 R2 renders reports to Excel in the xls (Excel 2003) format. Therefore if you want to use "Excel safe" colours then you should only use ones from the Excel 2003 colour palette.

There's a list of the available colours here.

There's no way to change the colour palette used by the entire Report Server, other than to manually edit the affected reports and change the colours used.

You could also check that the "white" lines in the report are actually set to use white as the bakcground colour and not a very pale colour that appears white onscreen/when printed.

Answer 2

If you use the 3rd party OfficeWriter renderer, you can create your own template workbook in Excel and customize the color palette however you like. With OfficeWriter's SSRS integration you can also export to both .xls and .xlsx, even with SSRS 2008 R2. See OfficeWriter for Reporting Services

Disclaimer: I work for SoftArtisans, the makers of OfficeWriter.

Answer 3

A simple way is to output your report to HTML first and use excel icon/button to export to excel from there and set the &rs:Format=EXCELOPENXML on the image(excel) properties of your Report RDL(html).

Hope this can help someone.

Regards,