Notice it also moves the horizontal axis to the right. When I check the box, Excel reverses the plot order. There, near the bottom, you'll see a checkbox called 'values in reverse order'. To make this change, right-click and open up axis options in the Format Task pane.

Luckily, Excel includes controls for quickly switching the order of axis values. It's the layout of the bar chart that makes it look like the data is reversed, since the values are plotted from the bottom to the top. The first value is plotted next to the origin, and subsequent values move away from the origin. 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.

Excel graph axis label start at 0