On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Andy Pope said:
The technique describes how to use an xy-scatter to construct the boxes.

You need to add a few more xy pairs in order to reduce the width of
the Median line and form the notches.

While I have as much reverence for the late John Tukey as the next
person, I don't see that boxes and whiskers as such are necessary these
days, except that they're a familiar idiom that the graph viewer will
usually recognise.

And even that isn't true for notched boxes, which I don't think many
people have seen. Certainly most couldn't interpret without them a
guide; I never even knew until reading that article just now what the
notches were supposed to represent-- I thought they were just meant to
enphasise the median in some way.

If we abandon the need to copy Tukey's shapes, doing this stuff in Excel
immediately gets a lot easier. Here's my idea of a boxless "box" and
whisker distribution chart, with circled outliers and an error range
around the median, all just using the standard Excel symbol shapes.

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r264/del_c/
infographics/not_boxplot.gif

It would be simple to substitute circles, diamonds, or half-ticks, and
alter the thickness or colour of the Excel error bars, to suit your
preferences, and I think the point comes across even though they're not
the traditional boxes.

--
Del Cotter
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