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.

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.