Last week I wrote a blog explaining how the new tool inside Reporting Services 2008 R2 called Indicator will be help for displaying KPIs in Reporting Services.  Today I want to looks at another nice feature added to Reporting Services in R2 called Data Bar.  It’s a small but nice add to the product that gives it a little bit of an Excel look and feel. 

You may already know there is a nice but simply feature in Excel to help you compare data called Data Bars shown below, shown below.

This same functionality with even the same name has been added to Reporting Services.  It works just like any chart that you may have used in the past.  Drag it into a cell of a table then tell it what value you want represented on the bars.  Data Bars do not work on the detail level group so you may receive an error if you try and add one there.  You can add a label to the bars so you know what values are represented however it seems that the property to change the alignment of the label does not work properly yet, see below.  Hopefully this will be fixed when the product is officially released.