Manual sorting of pivot table bars in Excel

Did you see my responses in your other thread?

How do I force sorting in a pivot table o… - Apple Community

Pivot Tables and Charts based on them are convenient for quick data analysis on the fly. But what you get in flexibility you give up in control over final presentation.

This is true in both Numbers and Excel. You can filter Pivot Tables, and remove Grand Total Rows and Columns, but you can't set the column order.

If you need a table and chart in a specific order that you can control, you can easily create a summary table by using SUMIFS, like this:

Note that you need to enter this formula just once, in B2. Then fill it or copy to the right and down in the summary table.

Then base your chart on that table instead of the Pivot Table. Note that you can now adjust the order of the columns in the Chart (if needed) by clicking on a series column in the chart and changing the value in the Order dropdown.

SG

[Edited by Moderator]

I see your concern - there's no mechanism to override the sort of the pivot table data on the chart - your options are pretty much ascending or descending, and that's it.

I was able to get a result similar to what you're aiming for by fudging the data a little. Instead of 'Bad' and 'OK' I set the cell values to " Bad" and " OK" (note the leading space). This forced 'Good' to be sorted alphabetically last, with the small cost of the leading space in the other columns. Probably not ideal, and it may not scale, but it was my first thought.

The other thought I had was that this is an unusual way of presenting the data. Wouldn't a Line chart, with one line per Good/OK/Bad be a better visual indicator of trends over time?

G_Luv wrote:

Actually, you can

manually sort in Excel, which will probably my goto solution.

Excel is a good app. Use it if it works best for you. But I think you will find manual sort of columns is not an option in Pivot Tables. As with Numbers, you have a choice of ascending or descending (alphabetical order).

I can't tell whether you have even tried the one-formula SUMIFS approach, which easily solves the problem you describe as wanting to solve.

SG

G_Luv wrote:

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