To make friends in a new town hit the bars – Old saying.
To make sense of a new data-set, make bar charts – New saying.
Bar charts (or column charts if you like your data straight up) are vital in data analysis. They are easy to make. But one problem. By default, a bar chart show the original data in reverse order.
See this example:
Unfortunately, we humans read from top to bottom, not the other way around.
So how to fix the bar chart order?
Simple. Follow below steps:
- Click on vertical axis of the bar chart and press CTRL+1 (or go to format axis from right click menu)
- Check “Show categories in reverse order” in the axis options pane.
- Your bar chart order is now fixed.
Bonus tip #1: Show bar charts in sorted order
You know what is better than original order of data? Bars sorted by how big they are. Just sort the original data set and your bar chart will reflect the change.
Bonus tip #2: Show horizontal axis at bottom
When you “show categories in reverse order”, Excel also moves the horizontal axis to top of the chart. If you want to show it at bottom, you can use below steps:
- Go to vertical axis settings (select vertical axis and press CTRL+1)
- Set Horizontal axis crosses setting to At maximum category (by default this would be automatic). See this screenshot.
So there you go. Bar charts that make sense.
Making awesome bar charts
If you dig bar charts, you are going to love below tutorials:
- Bar charts with lower & upper boundaries
- Thermometer chart with last year marker to show budget vs. actual values
- Keep calm & make column charts
- Rules for making awesome column & bar charts – podcasts
and one more joke…
I know we started the post with a joke. But I can’t resist one more. A default bar chart walks in the bar. The bartender says, “why are you upside down?”.
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.