1. Background

The aim of the article is to describe a way of adding data bars in the report to make report more interactive.

2. What is Data bar?

Data bars are small, simple charts that convey a lot of information in a little space.
Data bars are often used in table and matrices.
Data bars can represent multiple data points, but typically illustrate only one.
Data bars usually depict single value in a cell.
We cannot add a data bars to a detail group in a table.
Data bars do not have any category group. It will have only series grouping.

Types of Data bars:

3. Steps to add the Data bar in the report:

Below is the sample Sales report which shows year wise sales amount for various regions:

We will add data bars into the above report to show year wise sales amount for regions.

I. Go to report layout and remove FiscalYear column from the tablix:

After deleting column, report is having only two columns:

II. Preview the report:

Here we can see that Sales Region is repeating as we have deleted the fiscal year column so we can group the data by Sales Region to avoid duplicate records.

III. To create a group for SalesRegion, click on Details group in Row Group pane and select Group Properties:

IV. It will show the Group Properties:

V. Click on “Add” button and select “Sales Region” and click Ok:

VI. Now go to tablix and right click on SalesAmount text box and select expression:

VII. It will open the expression builder, add the SUM function to sales Amount:

=SUM(Fields!SalesAmount.Value)

Click Ok.

VIII. Preview the report. It will show the aggregated Sales Amount for SalesRegion:

Now we can see the report showing region wise aggregated Sales Amount.

Note: Now we will add the data bars to show progress of Sales Amount.

IX. For adding Data bar, right click on Report layout then Insert and select Data bar:

X. Select the data bar type:

It will show the Data bar in the report layout:

XI. Set the property for Data bar:

· Value – SalesAmount

· Series – Not required

· Category Group – Not required because we already grouped data into tablix by Sales Region

XII. Now add a new column into a tablix named SalesIndicator. Drag and drop the Data bar into this newly created column:

XIII. Now report layout looks like below one:

XIV. Now run the report and see whether we are able to see the sales amount progress or not:

Report is showing sales amount Indicator.

XV. We can add data label to Data bars. Right click on the data bars and select “Show Data Labels”:

Now we can remove the SalesAmount column as we are showing Data labels in the data bar itself.

XVI. Preview the report

Now report is showing with data labels.

XVII. Now we will add another data bar to show Sales Progress over years, Add a new column named Sales Progress and add a data bar into this newly created column. Set the Below property:

· Value : SalesAmount

· Series : FiscalYear

XVIII. Go to the property of the Data bar and set the horizontal axis range in such a way that it should show negative values too:

XIX. Preview the report:

XX. Now we will add one more data bar (Data Column)

Repeat the same steps as we did for Sales Indicator column:

XXI. Below is the report after adding Data column also in the report:

4. How to change Data bar to Chart

I. For Changing data bar to Chart, add a new column to the tablix and copy and paste one of the already created data bar to the newly created column. Then right click on the data bar and click on “Convert to Full Chart”