To me it seems nonsensical that the categories top to bottom are in the opposite order to that of the data, and that the order of the series is reversed (the yes bar should be on top).
I can reverse the order by choosing reverse category order in the axis format menu, but that also switches the horizontal axis to be at the top - you need to format it again to move the axis back down. Perhaps they did a user-group study and I'm the odd one out - the expected behavior is that the order is reversed. If not though, was this a decision that was made (wrongly) by a single person or software team? Is it a bug that no-one ever noticed? Was it understood to be wrong in an earlier version but not corrected due to concerns about compatibility? Am I just too fussy to think that defaults should reflect what the majority would expect the default to be?
Interestingly, there is also a bug I just found - if you have a secondary measure axis and have reversed the category axis, the series on the secondary axis are not reversed, so the data is plotted against the wrong category.
ReplyDeleteTo fix this you have to reverse your original data, and not use a reversed axis.
The reason the categories in your bar chart are plotted upside down is that they are plotted in the order they are listed in the spreadsheet, with respect to the axis. The first category is closest to the value axis (at the bottom) and the last category is furthest from the category axis (at the top).
ReplyDeleteIt's counter intuitive if you look at the worksheet data, but not if you look at how charts place values (and categories) with respect to the origin.
But yes, I grumble about reversing the order of categories too.
Alex -
ReplyDeleteI've never noticed that idiosyncrasy, but then it wasn't introduced until Excel 2007.
What you need to do is add a secondary category axis, reverse the order on it as well as on the primary category axis, then hide or delete the secondary category axis. If the baseline of the secondary bars is at the right of the chart, you have to format the secondary value axis to make the secondary value axis cross not at the maximum but use the "automatic" setting.