Hi Community!

Does anyone know how to make the order of the bars/color of the bars stay the same in a stacked bar chart?

Here is my chart:

I want Miscellaneous to always be on the bottom and Project to always be on the top of the stack.  But they seem to always order based on highest to lowest.  They also change colors so the top is always dark and bottom is always light. Can I get this to be ordered Misc, Asset, Proj and keep colors consistent?

Additionally, does anyone know how to make an overlay chart use the same y-axis so I don't have 0-300000 on both sides of my graph?

Thanks all!

Hey Molly,

One option would be to use the 'data' tab on the ribbon and select sort:

This will give you the option to manually choose which value you want to sort on and in which order. This works in many cases, but not all - depending on the data.

One trick I've utilized in the past is setting a synthetic sort column:

1. I have 3 values - high, medium, and low and I want them to always be in the same order with high on the bottom and low on the top.
2. I create a synthetic column in the table - where high = 1, medium = 2, and low = 3 (you could choose anything but those numbers are intuitive)
3. I hide that synthetic column so my end-users don't see it
4. I use the method above to select this new synthetic column as the criteria bu which to sort!

For the shared axis - just go into properties for the overlay char

Hope that helps!

Thank you so much, Jonathan!

I have a stack-able bar chart with data on y-axis and quarters on x-axis, sorting does not work there. Tried reverse order, it flips the order upside down, it helps the y-axis, but x-axis is also flipped i.e. Q4, Q3, Q2, Q1. If anyone knows of any other trick, please let me know.