There is an important fact in life that few people realise. I'll state it here, so you all know it:

SSRS reports don't have to be ugly.

You read that right. Read it again, if you want. It's still there.

Ok, kidding aside[ref]In life, this fact isn't that important - just ask someone who's had a baby girl for a few months

Spawned new process. Updated Twitter-profile. #SQLFamily has a new daughter ;-).

— Koos van Strien (@kvstrien) August 24, 2015

[/ref]. I want to show you how to create less-ugly SSRS reports. One might even call them nice.

In order to do this, you need two things

1. Some good sense about how to structure reports and, in general, show the numbers
2. Get rid of the old-fashioned default 'Office 2003'-theme in SSRS

Besides those two, you need to keep some other things in mind, which I'll explore in six posts:

1. The use of typography & fonts
2. (Re-)format tables
3. Altering chart styles
   • Bar & column charts
   • Line charts
   • Map charts
   • Gauges
4. Create nice report layouts
5. Alternative use of KPI's
6. Pick your data & visualizations

I know there's a lot of content available about SQL Server Reporting Services, but pretty much is about how to do the basics (SSRS 101) or how to accomplish a certain thing (like waterfall charts in SSRS before 2016). My series won't be as much on these techniques, but on delivering high-quality reports that in reflect the attention to detail you've given to the data you handled.

Stay tuned, tomorrow the first post will appear!