Last month I was at a Naomi Robbins’ workshop and she was pretty emphatic that dot plots are the better method of visualization, as compared to bar charts. The reason goes back to Cleveland’s early experiments on visual perception, which found that humans most accurately interpret locations on line, when those lines share a common axis. Even more accurate than length, which would be a bar chart. The problem is that most of us use Excel and dot plots are not a default chart option. On Naomi’s inspiration, I used a little elbow grease to make it work. Here are…
