# How can I change the series order of the legend in Plots?
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-i-change-the-series-order-of-the-legend-in-plots/20278
**Category:** Visualization
**Created:** [January 30, 2019, 2:43pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-i-change-the-series-order-of-the-legend-in-plots/20278 "2019-01-30T14:43:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@NiclasMattsson](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/NiclasMattsson)
#### Post date: [January 30, 2019, 2:43pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-i-change-the-series-order-of-the-legend-in-plots/20278/1 "2019-01-30T14:43:21Z")
When making stacked bar plots or stacked area plots, the default series order in the legend appears upside-down compared to the order in the plot itself. Example using the `groupedbar()` recipe provided by StatPlots:
```julia
using StatPlots
plotly()
groupedbar(rand(10,5), bar_position = :stack, lab=["A" "B" "C" "D" "E"])
```
The official word is that [you can’t currently specify the order](https://github.com/JuliaPlots/StatsPlots.jl/issues/140), but can someone come up with a hackish solution? I have to make a large number of stacked plots with 10+ series each, and I really don’t want to fix all those legends manually in Photoshop.
---
### Author:  [@NiclasMattsson](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/NiclasMattsson)
#### Post date: [January 30, 2019, 6:26pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-i-change-the-series-order-of-the-legend-in-plots/20278/2 "2019-01-30T18:26:22Z")
I came up with a disgusting little hack myself, I’ll explain it here if anyone else needs something similar.
The idea is to add more bars with dummy data (all zeros) to the plot using 5 (in this case) additional color categories, reusing the same 5 colors but in reverse order, then hide the legend entries for the original data, and finally showing legend entries for the new colors using the original legend labels. Like this:
```julia
groupedbar([1:10;12;12], [rand(10,5) zeros(10,5); zeros(2,10)], bar_position = :stack,
lab=["" "" "" "" "" "A" "B" "C" "D" "E"], color=[1 2 3 4 5 5 4 3 2 1], xlim=(0,11))
```
Note that I added two new bars with dummy data. Strangely, when I just added one the width of the bars changed a bit. (Why?)
Like I said, a nasty hack, but it’s easy to hide away the ugliness in a function. If anyone else has a better idea then please share.
---
### Author:  [@mkborregaard](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mkborregaard)
#### Post date: [January 30, 2019, 9:46pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-can-i-change-the-series-order-of-the-legend-in-plots/20278/3 "2019-01-30T21:46:50Z")
This is a bug in groupedbar, though. The colors of the bars should be reversed. You could take a look at just fixing the recipe?