In hot rolled and in cold rolled sheets of silicon steel there are directions of easiest magnetization both before and after the final high temperature anneal. They are exhibited clearly by a disk suspended in a magnetic field. This property can be explained by the fact that a great part of the crystals composing the sample lie in a preferred orientation. The samples thus exhibit to a higher or smaller degree the anisotropic magnetic properties of single crystals. This non‐random orientation of the crystals was shown for the annealed samples by a determination of the orientation of a great number of crystals by a light reflection method. The preferred orientations in cold rolled and hot rolled annealed samples differ substantially.