Introducing PTS Dot Plot Utility
by Jon Peltier
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2010.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Peltier Technical Services Inc is pleased to introduce the newest member of its suite of charting add-ins for Excel. The PTS Dot Plot Utility is based on the protocol in the Dot Plots tutorial on this web site, but it does all of the required calculations and chart manipulations automatically.
The Dot Plot Utility makes quick work of Dot Plots of one or more series, such as this population pyramid replacement showing US Male and Female population distribution by age group.
Like all PTS Chart Utilities, the Dot Plotter makes regular Excel charts, so you can format them to suit your needs.
Also like all PTS Chart Utilities, the Dot Plotter works in all Windows versions of Excel between 2000 and 2007. In “Classic” Excel, a Dot Plot menu item is added to the PTS Charts menu, and this menu is added if it is not already present. In Excel 2007, this Dot Plot item is added as a button to the PTS Charts ribbon tab, and this tab is added if it does not exist. A simple dialog allows the user to select some formatting options.
The PTS Dot Plot Utility is priced at $39.00 US, but for the next four weeks it is available at a discounted $29.00. If you use this chart type frequently, you owe it to yourself to check out this timesaver.
Related Posts:
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- Use Dot Plots for Better Categorical Comparisons
- State of the Blog – Year End 2009
- Pie for Dessert Again?
- PTS Blog Inaugural Post
- Macs vs. PCs
- Dating Site Photo Effectiveness
- Excel Chart Color Update
- Peltier Tech Chart Add-Ins Have Been Updated
- Tornado Charts and Dot Plots
Posted: Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 under Utilities.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from DaleW
Time: Friday, August 28, 2009, 8:59 pm
Nice utility!
Sometimes a bar chart or even a reformatted line chart (Chart Tamer’s dotplot) is a poor substitute for a real dot plot when visualizing numbers across many categories. Until Microsoft gets around to including the dot plot as a standard chart, this utility is the best and fastest way that I’ve seen to create them in Excel.
Jon, I noticed you used a different scaling trick in your utility than for your tutorial. Your tutorial teaches a reduced Height scale from 0 for 1 to align category labels and XY points. In the utility, you avoid the fractional numbers and simply scale height with category count from 0 to K+1, where K is the number of categories. Your slight tweak to relative scaling helps let the tick marks & horizontal grid (if desired) align with, instead of separate, the category labels.
Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: Friday, August 28, 2009, 10:50 pm
Dale -
Thanks for the comment. There was a great deal of development between the tutorial post and the professional version of the utility, including several interim versions of the utility which have strange effects. The charts come out fine, but when you reopen the workbook, the left hand axis has been destroyed. I had used a trick to populate the axis labels, which works to put the labels into place, but not to maintain them.
The tweaked axis scale was developed exactly for the alignment of gridlines that you describe.
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