Sorting a chart in SSRS sounds easy enough, but the sort option isn’t where you might expect to find it. In this example I am using Visual Studio 2012.

First let’s take a look at an unsorted chart. Even if you sort values in your underlying dataset, your chart will likely not be sorted.

One might expect to find sort options by right clicking the chart and going to Chart Properties which will not work. You then might think, of course it must be on the Series Properties. However, that again will not work. So let’s take a look at how to sort the chart. Start by double clicking the chart which will bring up the Chart Data box. Now you will probably expect to find sort options by looking at Value options.. and you would be wrong yet again. Click on the drop down arrow under the Category Groups. Select Category Group Properties.

Here you will find a Sorting option. Click Add and select what you would like to sort on.

Now you can see that we finally have a sorted chart.

When creating a new chart in SSRS, you may find that not all of the labels are being displayed on either the vertical or horizontal axis. This will happen when the chart tries to determine how many labels it can show using the default setting. Sometimes this isn’t the best solution. For example, as you can see in my chart below there should be plenty of room to show all of the labels but it decides not to.

In this case we definitely want to show all of the labels. To do this we will need to adjust some settings. Double click on the label names on the chart.

On the right hand side of Visual Studio, you should now see the Chart Axis values on the Properties area.

Under the Interval attribute, change the value from ‘Auto’ to 1. This will specify that we want to show labels on every occurrence.

Re-run the report and now you can see that all of the labels are shown.