“Ann, my bar chart is upside down! Help!”
You read my prior post about using horizontal bar charts for nominal variables like favorite fruits. My toddler is eating two! bananas a day so bananas are the winner in this fictional fruit contest. Our original table is ordered alphabetically and that just won’t do. Our viewers will either want to know about the favorite fruit (a greatest to least ordering) or they’ll want to know about the least favorite fruit (a least to greatest ordering).
You’ve got two options for re-sorting your bar chart.
Option A is to re-sort your table. If you’re not working in spreadsheets all the time, you may not have discovered sorting and filtering features before. Highlight your table (you can see which rows I highlighted in this screenshot), head to the Data tab, and click the Sort icon. You can sort either column. To arrange your bar chart from greatest to least, you sort the # of votes column from largest to smallest. Well, that would be the logical approach. A largest to smallest sorting should produce a largest to smallest chart, right? Right? Right? But the chart does a somersault! I’ve never figured out why spreadsheets do this. If you work for Microsoft, c’mon. Fix this already.
Here’s where option A comes in. You anticipate that your chart is going to do a somersault and sort your table the opposite of what you want to appear in your chart.
Option B, my preferred method, is to leave your table alone. I like my tables to match my charts–largest to smallest tables with largest to smallest graphs. It keeps me organized so that I don’t have to do mental somersaults every time I look at my screen.
To re-sort your chart, click on the category labels on the left. You’ll see a rectangular border appear around the outside of the categories.
Hold your mouse over the lettering, like the word apples. Right-click and select the option on very bottom of the pop-up menu called Format Axis.
Then, on the Format Axis window, check the box for Categories in Reverse Order. That’s a jargony name with a straightforward purpose. It just re-sorts your bar chart in the opposite order of your table.
Download the template
Chris Ganowski
Mar 14, 2017 -
Thanks for posting about this. I too have never understood while Excel reverses the sort order when transposing data from a table to chart. I generally use option B that you outlined above. However, I’ve noticed that if the chart includes a y axis, and you choose this option, Excel moves the axis from the bottom of the plot area to the top. Sometimes this isn’t an issue, like when you don’t use a y axis at all, as in your example. Or sometimes having a y axis at the top of the plot area makes logical and aesthetic sense. But there are cases where keeping the y axis at the bottom of the plot area is preferred, but by reversing the category order, this isn’t possible. I wonder if this whole thing is a strange little blip, or if there some kind of method to Microsoft’s madness…
Ian Watkins
Mar 20, 2017 -
Chris – in the Format Axis pane, as shown above, under horizontal axis crosses, change it to ‘at maximum category’. This will move the y-axis back to the bottom.
Dave Bruns
Apr 4, 2017 -
Hi Ann – with categories in reverse order – Jon Peltier has a nice article on the source of this problem in Excel. The gist: Excel plots low values closest to the origin, and higher values further away. This works well for column charts, but causes bar charts to look upside down.
Dawn Reinhardt-Wood
Oct 1, 2017 -
Thank you! Life saver! Or, at least, hair saver! Been pulling mine out for a half hour.