Reply To: Ordering categories within categorical variables

#742
Anonymous
Inactive

I fully agree with Andee. It really makes visualization confusing and teaches the wrong instincts about the slope of the line. Graphs and text are read in very different ways.  How data is organized should be consistent (whether it is categorical or numeric, especially if the categories have some level of magnitude) and it should work with conventions used in graph reading rather than text reading when there is a conflict between the two.  And on a minor note, if you switch back and forth between treating an attribute as numeric or categorical (we actually have some texting data that you might want to consider doing this with) your graph completely changes, which really feels nonsensical.