MS SSRS - Creating and copying custom palette

There are some preset palettes in Report Designer to use in charts. I did custom palettes because the variety of colours is not enough in preset palettes. I needed more than 10-13 different colours to the charts. I designed the custom palette using a colour pair system. In that system dark and light shade of same colour make one pair. That way bars in the chart or slices in the pie would be easier to recognize.

One good tool for designing a colour scheme is COLORBREWER. It is a colour advise for cartography but why not use it for other visual forms too. In that website you just specify couple of options for your colour scheme and then it gives you the results. You can get for example print friendly or colorblind save schemes only and see RGB values for those colours too.

Custom palette is defined to the chart in its properties pane. First choose palette option Custom and second go to CustomPaletteColors section. There you choose Members (= colours) in ReportColor Collection Editor. See pictures below.

I made the custom palette of 24 colours. I needed to have it in many other charts too so easiest way was to copy it. Copying is done in Code View of the report. Find the right section from the XML-code and replace preset palette name with your custom palette definition. In these example pictures replacable palette is Chocolate. XML-code for the custom palette includes definition of the colours.