Subscripts and Superscripts in SSRS Reports

               Two weeks back, I was reading an insightful article by Thomas LaRock – Delivering a Great Presentation. A couple of lines kept on lingering in my mind, mainly
– “Storytelling is a very powerful way for you to communicate ideas because they are such a powerful way for people to learn”
– “There are five stories that make up effective presentations. Every great story falls into one of these five:- the Quest, the Stranger, the Love story, the Rags to Riches and the Revenge story”
The more I thought about it, the more I could relate the same to blogs. I always tended to remember more articles or facts which were woven around a story than those which were plainly narrated. And also, I found that most blogs which I liked, if not all, could be categorized into the above said sections. Well, today’s blog is going to be the story of a quest, something which I had tried to achieve months before, lost hope and abandoned it, and then again renewed efforts and finally, found the solution – how to use superscripts and subscripts in SSRS reports.
 
It all started with one of my colleagues challenging me to write a chemical equation and a mathematical equation together in SSRS. What I failed to understand when I took up the bet was that it was a cleverly disguised challenge to implement superscripts and subscripts in SSRS. The challenge was to display the following in SSRS:-
 
Chemical Mathematical equation
 
Five minutes in BIDS and I understood that I was trapped. All I could remember next was me frantically pacing through all the search engines racing against time and a flurry of web pages opening. But apart from this link in the SSRS forum, I couldn’t find much help and I had to concede defeat. Laden with a bruised ego and a lighter pocket, I decided to delve more deeper into it. After quite a bit of research, I found 2 ways –
 
Solution 1

1. Note down the following codes Superscript and subscript codes 2. Use expressions along with the chrw function in textbox. Eg:- =”a”&chrw(8304)&chrw(185)&chrw(178)&chrw(179)&chrw(8308)&chrw(8309)&chrw(8310)&chrw(8311)&chrw(8312)&chrw(8313) Expression builder 3. Make sure that the font is Lucida Sans Unicode. Font 4. Now you can preview the result. Preview report  

Solution 2
 
1. Click on Start→Run and type charmap.exe. Click OK.
Run window
 
2. Change the font to Lucida Sans Unicode and then find the character that you need. For eg, Subscript Two is selected in the image below.

Charmap Once that is selected, click on Select and continue writing your chemical/mathematical equation in the same way. 3. Once that is done, click on copy button (and not Ctrl+C or any other shortcut button) and all you have to do is to paste it in a textbox in the report. Make sure that the font is Lucida Sans Unicode for the textbox. Textbox with chemical equation 4. Click on preview and you will have the equation that you wanted. Preview report with equation Note : You can select any character in the Character Map and then use the chrw function. For that, note down the number in the character map (for eg, in the image above for Step 2, the number for Subscript 2 is 2082) and convert it from hex to binary (You can use sites like this for converting it if you don’t want to do the maths) and then use it within the chrw().

Posted by SQLJason

3 comments

Nice one, could be usefull in the future. Thx!

It is not working….? how you did

Thanks a lot!
This helped me use ‘1’ as superscript inside a text box in SSRS.

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