One way to do this is by using a look-up-table (LUT) to go between your text category and a numerical ID.
Here is a general example of a LUT.
Map the ID to your unsorted data:
Then use the ID with the ‘sortwith’ column property and another map column to recover the text category.
Another quick way is to use the Pivot command.
You can use the Pivot as a pass through to do the sorting. If needed you can also extract the data back to the data table. For example, if you want to have a different color bar depending on the category, plot the extracted data using a Bar command.
We just posted a step-by-step example using the Pivot command to sort, in File/On-line examples.
Hope this helps!