Listen, no one cares about the order you listed the response options on the survey.

Most graphs, especially those auto-generated from survey software, showcase the data in that order.

But that isn’t useful for anyone trying to interpret the data. The order that the questions were asked on the survey doesn’t have much meaning.

Instead, put the bars in order from greatest to least.

Greatest to least is the order that will answer your audience’s primary questions. At least, that’ll be the case when we are talking about categorical data, where there is no natural order to the response options themselves.

You can’t exactly move the bars around within the data display, but you can get them in the right order by sorting the data in the table. 

I’ll show you how to sort your data in Excel because (did you know this?) Excel secretly hates you and it’ll plot your data in the opposite order that you have it sorted in your spreadsheet. You can see this in my first example.

So, to sort in Excel, highlight the rows containing data, not including the headings. Click the arrow by the Sort and Filter button in the Editing group on the Home tab to see Custom Sort. Choose the column with your values in it and select Smallest to Largest. The graph automatically updates to reflect your new categorical order. 

To finish it off, remove the chart border, thicken the bars, and use that title to tell a story.

Order conveys meaning.

Years ago, I saw this graph and I wish I had done a better job of jotting down the source. I thought it was a perfect example of why we need to sort data greatest to least on one of these variables.

It’s harder than necessary to answer basic questions like, who are the top 3 energy users? because your eyeballs have to bounce all over the place. GREATEST TO LEAST!

Then I realized that there IS an order to this data. Can you see it?

It’s geographic. Like a Canadian-centric tour of the world.

So someone did put some thought into the order of the chart. They just went in the wrong direction.

Side note: I was just in Canada discussing this matter with a room of 100 or so Canadians and they said convention there was to graph provinces from west to east. I had never heard of that before. Aren’t Canadians so delightful?

Sometimes there may be circumstances where you should defer to a different order.

Ordinal data, such as income levels or age groups, might be best in their natural order. Or maybe not.

You’ll know the right sort for the data by putting yourself into the headspace of your *primary* audience. Which way would they want to see it?

If I was graphing Michigan county populations, I’d show it greatest to least if my *primary* audience was national.

But if my primary audience was composed of people who live in Michigan counties, they’re more likely to want to see the data sorted alphabetically, so they can easily find themselves, rather than hunt for their county name in a nonalphabetical list.

So using an intentional order means that you have thought carefully about the way the data can be sorted so it will make the most sense to your audience. And I promise you, it’ll never be the order of the questions on the survey.

Intentional order is one of many graph guidelines you can find on the Data Visualization Checklist. The Checklist will walk you through all the formatting you need to attend to so you have a chart that tells your story.