Excel - Box and whisker chart

Box and whisker is another chart used in statistics to show distribution of data. Suppose you are a watermelon farmer. You weigh 10 watermelons and the weights are below. Unit of the weight is pound.

1. Select the data. Then click Insert > Charts > Other Charts. Under Statistical, select Box and Whisker.

 2. You get a box and whisker chart now. The thin line at the bottom shows the minimum. The thin line on top shows the maximum. There is a blue box in the middle. Bottom of the blue box shows 25 percentile of the data. Top of the blue box shows 75 percentile of the data. There is an "X" mark in the middle of the blue box, which shows the median.


3. Suppose we have a super big watermelon which weighs 25 pounds. The data is below. If we make a box and whisker chart again, it displays an outlier because the 25 pound watermelon is way too heavier than other ones. Excel treats any value as an outlier if its value is too much away from other numbers.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excel - Hierarchical chart (Treemap)

Image
If you have hierarchical data, you can create beautiful hierarchical charts. For example, in a university, there are students of different majors in departments, and departments in schools. Suppose we have data below, showing number of students in each school, department and major. In this example, we show you how to make treemap chart. The other type of hierarchical chart is sunburst chart. The data is equivalent if all the cells are filled. I like the following format better. 1. Select the data, then click Insert > Charts > Other Charts > Hierarchical . Select Treemap .  2. A nice-looking treemap chart is shown. The blue area shows all engineering students. The orange area shows all business students. Size of each rectangle is proportional to the number of students in each major.
Read more

Excel - Solver examples

Image
Excel Solver is used to solve optimization problems, which is like solving equations. In this tutorial, we will give a very simple example on how to use Excel Solver. Basic example Suppose your car is low on gasoline. The gasoline is $3/gallon. You have a budget of $50. How much gasoline can you buy? Of course, for a problem this simple, we do not even need a Solver to solve the problem. However, the purpose is to teach the users how to use Excel Solver, so we make the problem extremely simple. We have the following framework: Goal: maximize quantity of gasoline Relationship: cost=quantity * unit price Constraint: cost<=budget 1. In cell B1, we enter unit price "3", in cell B4, we enter the budget 50. In cell B2, we just enter an arbitrary number as the number of gallons. We entered 5. In cell B3, we enter the formula "=B1*B2" to let it be the cost, which equals to 15. 2. Click Solver under the Data menu. 3. A Solver dialog window pops up. In "Set objective...
Read more

Excel - IF function

Image
If function is a logic function. It does two things: Whether the criteria is met Return a value based on whether the criteria is met or not. If the criteria is met, it returns one value; if the criteria is not met, it returns a different value. The reason IF function is confusing for some Excel users is that it does two things: a logical test, AND a return value depending on the logical test result, while the name of "IF" implies it only does a logical test. If this function only returns TRUE or False, it would be much easier to understand. In the following example, there are 5 employees, each having his own budget. Column C records the exact amount of money they spent. If the actual spending is greater than budget, we call it "Over budget", otherwise, we call it "Within budget". The IF function is: =IF(C2>B2,"Over budget","Within budget") The first part, "C2>B2", is a logical test. If this is TRUE, then the IF function ...
Read more