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Horizontal Dumbbell Dot Plots in Excel

Stephanie Evergreen walks us through an interesting technique for creating dumbbell-style dot plots in Excel:

Ok, babes, prepare to be amazed. It used to be that making this viz was pretty tedious but I’ve recently refined a totally new hack (thanks to a lollipop chart example provided by Sevinc Rende, one of my mentees) that makes this soooooooo easier. It used to be ninja level 9. Now it is ninja level 5, if that.

We will create a dumbbell dot plot out of a stacked bar, where the first stack is composed of our first set of dot values and the second stack is composed of *the difference* between our first and second values (so that it would end at our second values on the x-axis scale). So let’s calculate the difference between the 2020 and 2010 scores.

Read on to see how.