What do the following have in common: Converse Chuck Taylors, bell bottoms, skinny jeans, the Mustang and the Camaro (both “greener” these days), John Travola, and greenbar paper? Each was once very popular, went out of fashion for a time, and has since made a fantastic comeback.

You’re thinking, “Greenbar? Really?” Well, sort of. Here at Alliance Global Services, we work very hard to differentiate ourselves by building earnest partnerships with our clients; and we like to “wow” them whenever possible. Sometimes that’s a complex proposition, but sometimes it’s really quite simply. One of our clients is heavily invested in SSRS for reporting, and we write a lot of reports for them. Some time ago we began incorporating “greenbar emulation” as a standard feature in all of our SSRS reports (if you’re not creating reusable templates, you should be). Greenbar emulation isn’t a standard, “out of the box,” feature of SSRS, but implementing it is so easy that it makes little sense not to; especially considering the “wow” factor—user feedback from our very first UAT cycle was overwhelmingly positive, and greenbar emulation is now almost universally appreciated by our client’s business user community.

To get the greenbar effect, simply add the following code to the BackgroundColor property of the appropriate TableRow: = iif (rownumber(nothing) mod 2 = 0, “Azure”, “Transparent”) See screenshot below (obviously fee free to replace “Azure” with whatever color you prefer).

Your clients might not appreciate your bell bottoms, skinny jeans, or the fact that you’re a registered fan of John Travolta’s Facebook page, but they will definitely appreciate this little extra touch in their SSRS reports.

Thanks,

James