SSRS…How to bold part of an expression

Can you bold part of an expression in your SSRS report?  YES!  By using placeholders and some HTML tags you can.

It sounds like it would be hard, but it is very easy to do.  Below we have a report that looks nice, but we would like to only bold the city name in the total line.

Click the Design tab and double click the current expression we currently have.  Then right click and select Create Placeholder.

This brings up the placeholder properties screen.  Select the HTML radio button and then click the FX on the Value line.

That brings up our current expression (see below).  We just need to add some HTML tags around the section we want bolded.

Below I concatenate the HTML tag for bold <b> and to turn it off I add the </b> tag at the end.  To see all of the HTML tags that are allowed, please follow this link:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645967(v=SQL.100).aspx

Now we preview the report again, and the required data is now bold!

And there you have it.  There are lots of things that are not obvious on how to accomplish, but by clicking around you can find all kinds of neat things.