Chart Appearance

  • Article

In the Chart control, you can customize the appearance of all chart elements using their appearance properties. Each chart element contains a rich set of appearance properties, which enables you to control the Chart control's appearance to very fine granularities.

Due to the variety of the appearance properties, the best way to know what you can control in an element is to look in the Properties window.

For example, for most line-type elements, you can control some or all of the following properties: color, dash style, width, start cap, end cap, shadow, shadow offset, and so on.

For elements with a surface, including markers and annotations, you can control some or all of the following background properties: color, secondary color, transparency, gradient, hatch style, image, image wrap mode, and so on.

For text elements, you can control the some or all of the following properties: size, font, color, orientation, style, shadow, shadow offset, and so on.

Note

When both the parent and child elements have the same appearance properties, the child element always take precedence over the parent element. For example, DataPoint properties take precedence over Series properties.

Colors and Palettes

The Chart.Palette property defines a set of default colors to use for series and data points. The Series.Palette property likewise defines a set of default colors to use for its data points. Use these properties to give your series and data points a specific look.

To specify a custom palette for the Chart control, use the Chart.PaletteCustomColors property. This property takes precedence over Chart.Palette. Likewise to specify a custom palette for a series, use the Series.PaletteCustomColors property.

Anti-Aliasing and Soft Shadows

The Chart control can smooth the sharp color gradients using anti-aliasing. This makes the chart image much more pleasing to the viewer's eyes. To do this, use set the Chart.AntiAliasing property to AntiAliasingStyles.Text, AntiAliasingStyles.Graphics, or AntiAliasingStyles.All.

When shadows are displayed for any chart element, you can also smooth the shadows by setting the Chart.IsSoftShadows property to True.

See Also

Reference

System.Windows.Forms.DataVisualization.Charting
System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting

Other Resources

Using Chart Controls

Build Date:

2012-08-02