Displaying HTML content in Reporting Services 2008

A friend of mine that works for Microsoft pinged me yesterday about how to strip HTML tags out of text he was trying to display in Reporting Services. He just wanted the text displayed. The typical text looked like this:

SciTech Software is a software development and consulting company. The company was founded in 1991 with the intention of creating software for scientific instruments, but our focus has shifted towards creating tools for developers.

We have worked in close collaboration with <a href="http://****http://www.thermometric.com/">Thermometric** **AB</a> with some of our products, but now we concentrate on our own tool for the .NET Framework: <b><a href="http://****http://memprofiler.com/">.NET** **Memory Profiler</a></b>.

We have extensive experience developing using C++, Java and C#. Currently, our main development environment is the .NET Framework.

I’d heard this could be done in Reporting Services 2008 so I tried it and it’s easy. I presume others might find simple instructions helpful:

  1. In the table where I want to display the column, right-click the cell and chose Create Placeholder….

2. On the General tab (of the new placeholder’s properties), set the value to the required column.

  1. In the Markup type, choose the option for HTML - Interpret HTML tags as styles

and you’re done.

2008-08-25