Box and Whisker Plots Excel

How to Create Box and Whisker Plots Excel

Box and Whisker Plots Excel: Basically Excel does not offer Box and Whisker charts. You can only inveigle a type of Excel chart into boxes and whiskers. The Box and Whisker plots shows the median, first quartile, third quartile, minimum, and the maximum data set instead of showing mean and standard error. Boxes may contain vertically extending lines called whiskers.

The whiskers indicate variability outside upper and lower quartiles called outliers. In statistics this type of statistics is referred to as the five-number summary. Each five-number summary is represented as a box with whiskers. On top of the box is the third quartile. The bottom is bound by the first quartile while the median divides the box.

 

Box and Whisker Plots Excel
Box and Whisker Plots

 

The error bars are called the whiskers. One extends upwards to the maximum from third quartile. The other downwards to the minimum from the first quartile.

Creating Box and Whisker Plots

The first thing you need to do is put data into worksheets. Then you select data either as a single data series or as multiple data series. Then go to Excel and click the Insert button followed by the Insert Statistics Chart. After selecting these parts click the Box and Whisker button. It’s important however to put into account the fact that these steps work differently in Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint.

After the mentioned steps, proceed to the Insert tab under the Illustrations group and click Chart. In the Insert Chart box, go to All Charts tab then click Box and Whisker. By using the Design and Format dialogue boxes you can customize your chart’s look. In situations whereby you don’t see these tabs you can click anywhere in the Box and Whisker chart and add Chart Tools to your ribbon.

Changing Box and Whisker Chart Options

To change the chart options of box and whisker right click one of the boxes on the chart. Select that box and proceed to the shortcut menu and click the Format Data Series button. Once the Format Data Series pane has been selected, go to Series Option and make your customization as you want. The following descriptions are used in the Series options.

The Gap Width that controls the gaps between the categories. Show inner points which displays data points that lie between lower and upper whisker line. The Show outlier points displays outlier points that lie either below or above the whisker line. Show mean markers shows the mean markers of the chosen series.

The Show mean line displays the line that connects the mean of the boxes in the chosen series. Quartile calculation chooses a method for calculating median.

Whenever the median is included in the calculation, it is called Inclusive median. In this case the number of values in the data is odd. For Exclusive median, the number of values in the data is odd and the median is excluded from the calculations.

In Box and Whisker plots Excel, once you finish the Format Data Series panel, you can leave your one data series open. Then you can choose another data series chart and start to format it.