Now, what happens if I change this chart to a bar chart?Īt first you might think that Excel changed the sort order of the axis labels.īut, if you look closely, the order is the same.
The main thing to understand here is that the category labels start next to the origin, and each new value is plotted further away from the origin.
In this case, the first column is Cuba, and the last is Barbados, so the columns match the order of the source data moving moving top to bottom.Ī line chart and area chart don't make sense for this data, but if I temporarily try them out, you can see the plot order stays the same. When Excel plots data in a column chart, the labels run from left to right to left. Let me insert a standard column chart and let's look at how Excel plots the data. Here we have data for the top 10 islands in the Caribbean by population. In this video, we'll look at how to reverse the order of a chart axis.
