Microsoft Business Intelligence

Recently I had a requirement to set the colour of a couple of non-calculated measures in Analysis Services to differentiate between an actual and inferred value. It was another one of those things that I’d remembered being as simple as selecting a value from the properties screen… Unfortunately my memory deceives me and I was greeted with a properties window totally devoid of any colour settings!

Conveniently it’s easy (enough) to set the colours using MDX in the cube calculation script. SSAS defines colour values using a somewhat strange system, there’s a great post from Boyan Penev explaining this – Colour Codes in SSAS.

To set the colour of the Amount measure in the Adventure Works cube to a lovely shade of pink, you’d add the following line to the cube calculation script…

With the resulting err… lovely pink measure when browsed from Management Studio.