ASP.NET RIA OLAP controls use Silverlight application as client side. It allows you to visualize OLAP data with maximal efficiency. Thus, RIA controls are much more flexible in setting the visual part of the OLAP-report. This article discusses the most effective ways to set the control's appearance.

There are two principal ways of setting control appearance:

1. Setting one of the pre-defined skins through the RiaStyle property.
2. Setting the values of the properties describing the visualization of different control parts.

There is a skin gallery:

Office 2003	BlueIce
Gray	WinXP
Green	Olive
Simple

The most reasonable way would be to combine those two: first, select the most suitable skin for the desired control appearance, and then, perform the fine setting, correcting the visual properties of separate parts.

The basic control settings, like background, foreground and font, can be adjusted through the appropriate control properties.

The appearance of the rest of control areas is configured by the following properties:

As a rule, these properties allow you to set the background and font color as well as the font's size and type face. The background filling may be either solid or gradient.