Printable builder · Landscape · 1 page

The Dumbbell Chart

A one-page dumbbell chart — a connected dot plot — that lines your categories down the page and puts every one on a single shared value axis: a dot for the start reading, a dot for the end reading, and a bar joining them. The bar's length is the gap between the two, and its colour is the direction — green where the number climbed, red where it slipped — so a whole page of rows sorts itself into gainers and losers before you have read a single figure. It is the cleaner cousin of two bars side by side: rather than making your eye compare two heights, it draws the change itself as one horizontal stretch, and because every row shares the same axis, a long bar really is a big move and a short one really is small. It is built for a before-and-after story told across many items at once — key metrics at the start of a program versus ninety days in, this year against last across regions, planned versus actual by project, a survey scored at two points, prices then and now. Each dot carries its exact value, ticks mark the scale along the bottom, a signed change pill sits at the end of every row, and the header tallies how many rose against how many fell. It reads best when the rows share a unit and a rough scale, so the bars stay comparable at a glance. List a label and its two readings per line and the dots, bar, colour and pill all place themselves; leave it blank to print the bare axis and plot the pairs by hand.