Causes of defective cereal boxes

If there is no natural ordering of the categories, alphabetical ordering is rarely best. Rearranging them in decreasing order of frequency often makes the bar chart easier to understand.

In a quality control example such as this, the sorted barchart shows the most important categories on the left and the least important ones on the right.

A manufacturer of breakfast cereals has received complaints about defective boxes of corn flakes being shipped to supermarkets. The output from one week was checked for defects and the following table shows the main reasons for boxes being rejected as defective.