How can I change the order of the bars in this bar graph?

[Noah Spencer]

I am a beginner Stata user. For a research project, whose information I must unfortunately keep confidential, I am trying to adjust a bar graph so that the order of the bars are "Increase", "Same", "Decrease" instead of the default alphabetical "Decrease", "Increase", "Same".

To create this graph, I load in my cleaned dataset and run:

 graph bar, by(byvar) over(groupvar)

In an attempt to try to re-order the bars, I ran:

gen order=1 if groupvar=="Increase"
replace order=2 if groupvar=="Same"
replace order=3 if groupvar=="Decrease"
graph bar, by(byvar) over(groupvar, sort(order)) .

I get the error message "variable mean not found".

How should I fix this?

(Apologies if this is too difficult to answer without being able to see the graph and data.)

[Noah Spencer]

I figured it out! The issue is just that you need to include a y variable. I just included age (not related to anything I was showing in the graph, but I had data on it for all observations.

  
 graph bar (percent) yvar, by(byvar) over(groupvar, sort(order))

[Federico Tedeschi]

I figured it out! The issue is just that you need to include a y variable. I just included age (not related to anything I was showing in the graph, but I had data on it for all observations.

graph bar (percent) yvar, by(byvar) over(groupvar, sort(order))

Thank you. It actually didn't work for my code (I received the error message: ") required"), since it was

graph bar, over (yvar) over(time) percentages asyvars stack legend(label(1 "High") label(2 "Medium") label(3 "Low"))

that became

graph bar, over (yvar, sort(order)) over(time) percentages asyvars stack legend(label(1 "High") label(2 "Medium") label(3 "Low"))

Nevertheless, the idea of generating a reverse variable led me to the solution. I did:

graph bar, over (order) over(time) percentages asyvars stack legend(label(1 "Low") label(2 "Medium") label(3 "High"))