Customizing a Color Scheme

• Jun 15, 2026
• 4 minutes to read

The Dashboard Designer allows you to edit colors and styles in global and local color schemes. You can select a color or style from a dashboard palette or specify a custom color or style.

• Invoke a Color Scheme Dialog
• Edit Colors
• Add a New Value
• Add a New Color Table
• Customize a Color Scheme in Code

Invoke a Color Scheme Dialog

To edit colors and styles, use the Color Scheme dialog. You can open this dialog in the following ways:

• To edit colors and styles in a global color scheme, use the Edit Colors button in the Home ribbon tab or the Edit Colors button in the dashboard item’s Design tab.

  

• To edit colors and styles in a local color scheme, use the Edit Colors button in the contextual Design ribbon tab.

  

Consider a Chart dashboard item whose dimensions and measures are colored by hue with local colors.

For this dashboard item, the Color Scheme dialog will contain combinations of all dimension values and a specific measure.

In this dialog, you can perform the following actions.

• Edit automatically assigned colors/styles or specify new colors/styles.
• Add new values to a color table.
• Add new color tables that contain values whose colors and styles are not yet assigned.

Edit Colors

You can customize automatically assigned colors and styles in several ways.

• To retain the automatically assigned color for the selected value, right-click the required value in the Value column and select Retain this color.

  

  This reserves the current palette color for the selected value.

• You can click the required cell in the Color column to select another palette color.

  

• To specify a custom color, click More Colors… and use the RGB or HSB color model in the invoked Select Color dialog to choose any color.

  

• To specify a fill style, click the required cell in the Fill Style column and select the required hatch style from the drop-down list.

  

• To specify a line style, click the cell in the Line Style column and select the line style from the drop-down list.

  

Use the Reset/Reset all menu items to reset the customized color(s).

Add a New Value

The Color Scheme dialog allows you to add a new value with the specified color to the selected color table. To do this, click the New Value… button.

In the invoked New Value dialog, specify the dimension values, add the required measures and click OK. This creates a new value whose color can be specified as described in Edit Colors.

You can use the Remove context menu item to remove manually added values.

Add a New Color Table

The Color Scheme dialog also allows you to add a new color table that contains values whose colors are not yet assigned. To do this, click the New Color Table… button.

In the invoked dialog, specify the data source, add the required dimensions and enable the ‘MeasureNames’ Dimension check-box if you need to add measures to a color table.

Click OK to add the color table to a color scheme. Then, you can add values to this table (see Add a New Value) and specify its colors (see Edit Colors).

Customize a Color Scheme in Code

You can color dashboard item elements in the following two ways.

• Use a global color scheme to paint identical values across the dashboard with consistent colors. To access the dashboard color scheme, use the Dashboard.ColorScheme property.
• Use a local color scheme to paint each dashboard item with an individual set of colors. For instance, you can use the ChartDashboardItemBase.ColorScheme property to access a local color scheme for the Chart and Pie dashboard items.

Use the ColorScheme class to access a collection of ColorSchemeEntry objects that map dimension values and measures to colors and styles. Use the following members for this purpose:

• The ColorSchemeEntry.DimensionKeys collection contains ColorSchemeDimensionKey objects that allow you to specify the dimension and corresponding dimension value. Use the Dimension.GetDimensionDefinition method to obtain the dimension definition and pass the returned object to the ColorSchemeDimensionKey constructor.
• The ColorSchemeEntry.MeasureKey property returns the ColorSchemeMeasureKey object. This object allows you to specify measures to be colored. Use the Measure.GetMeasureDefinition method to obtain the measure definition and pass the returned object to the ColorSchemeMeasureKey constructor.
• The ColorSchemeEntry.DataSource property specifies the data source that contains the required dimensions and measures.
• The ColorSchemeEntry.ColorDefinition property specifies the color, hatch style, and line style used to paint the specified dimension values/measures. You can select the color from a built-in palette or specify a custom color. View Example: How to customize a dashboard color scheme

You can also substitute the entire palette that supplies colors and styles to the color scheme. Handle the DashboardDesigner.CustomPalette or DashboardViewer.CustomPalette event and assign a DashboardPalette (built from DashboardPaletteItem objects) to the CustomPaletteEventArgs.Palette parameter. Use CustomPaletteEventArgs.PaletteName to recolor a specific built-in palette.