Make SQL Server Reporting Services use metric measurements

Question

I'm newly getting into creating and programming reports using SQL Server Reporting Services.

One thing that bugs me right off the bat: I can't seem to find an easy way to tell the BIDS (Business Intelligence Dev Studio, a.k.a. Visual Studio) to use the metric system for measurements - you know - millimeters, centimeters etc., instead of inches and so on.

I was trying to figure out whether that's a setting inside Visual Studio (and if so: where is it??), or whether this depends on the Reporting services instance we're going against (and again: if so, where the heck can I change that???).

There must be a way to change this!! Except for the US, no one in the world is still measuring in inches..... c'mon - the world at large has long since adopted the metric system! Don't tell me Microsoft makes me go back into the dark ages.....

Answer 1

For SSRS 2008, edit the Report.rdl template at

<Visual_Studio_Install_dir>\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject

and add the following line before the closing </Report> tag:

<rd:ReportUnitType>Cm</rd:ReportUnitType>

This will default all new reports (created by Add New Item -> select Report) to use centimetres. However, as Ed noted, reports created by the Report Wizard seem to be hard-coded to use inches.

Something else to note is that whatever you place in that Report.rdl file will be used when creating a new report, so you can setup default page sizes, fonts, etc...