SSRS: Adjust Bar Chart Width

This might be useful if you have a lot of series in your groups and you need to maximize your real estate on your chart. Or maybe you have an area chart type in the background that you can’t read because the columns are so wide. Below I will show you a very easy process of how to adjust the column widths in your SSRS chart.

This first image shows you the default width of the bar chart.

To adjust the width simply select the appropriate series and go to the properties pane and drill down into the Custom Attributes and find the PointWidth. The default value is set to 0.8. You can experiment with the settings yourself to find the size that works for you.

I found that I like to use 0.4 because the column isn’t too wide or small.

SSRS Action to Open Outlook Email

The process to open a MS Outlook email from a report action is a very simple task. The only requirement should be obvious but you will need the email addresses of the contacts. All you have to do is setup an SSRS action with or without an SSRS expression as shown below.

So the expression would look like something below.

Hard Coded:

=”MailTo:UserName@CompanyName.com”

Dynamic:

If you already have the email address in your dataset you could create the SSRS expression and just concatenate the ‘MailTo:’ to the beginning of the field. So that would look something like this,

=”MailTo:” & Fields!Email.Value

You could also do the concatenation in your SQL query as well. Then you would just reference the email address field in the action. So it would look just like any other field value, =Fields!EmailAction.Value.

Now that you have the expression, go set up the action as ‘Go to URL’ and plug in your expression. After you preview the report and you click on the email it should open a new email window with the individual’s email you clicked on.