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Del Cotter Del Cotter is offline
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Default Creating notches in box whisker plots in Microsoft Excel

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Jon Peltier said:
If we are introducing different visuals for the error of the median, why not
retain the "familiar idiom" of the box chart, and merely add a visual to
represent the error. This could be a line across the bar (like your red
markers in either version of your chart) or some other type of marker. It
avoids reinvention of the entire wheel.


My intention was to give the people who need to click on the Wizard the
opportunity to construct a graph that portrays what they want, and
doesn't require changing series chart types and so on. I don't want to
get into an argument about this; I don't have anything against the
traditional box as such. I just say it's not absolutely necessary.

I do have something against notches, though, and I've worked out what it
is: I always got the impression that the width of the waist meant
something, which is why I was so surprised to finally find out that it
was all just about the height of the notch, not how deeply it cuts into
the box. Because the notches were straight lines, they looked like this:

<


and had different angles for different heights. To counteract this, I
may see if I can use my limited artistic skills to design an AutoShape
or group of Autoshapes a bit like this:

} {

and substitute it for the central bar of a stacked bar chart. The idea
is that because the vertical lines will stay vertical for all values, it
will be more obvious that the information being presented is all about
heights, and widths should be ignored. I'm hoping that the final visual
effect will be intuitively obvious to people used to traditional
notches, and not cause them any confusion.

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Del Cotter
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