Sorting Your Bar Charts

"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 very 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.

Head over to the blog to download this spreadsheet for yourself.