Does anyone know how to create the notches in the vertical box whisker
charts?

An example can be found in figure 10 of the following article:

http://www.qualitydigest.com/oct97/html/excel.html

Thank you!!

Hi,

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.

Cheers
Andy

wrote:
Does anyone know how to create the notches in the vertical box whisker
charts?

An example can be found in figure 10 of the following article:

http://www.qualitydigest.com/oct97/html/excel.html

Thank you!!

On Jun 15, 8:47 am, Andy Pope wrote:
Hi,

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.

Cheers
Andy



wrote:
Does anyone know how to create the notches in the verticalboxwhisker
charts?

An example can be found in figure 10 of the following article:

http://www.qualitydigest.com/oct97/html/excel.html

Thank you!!- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Can you elaborate on the technique?

Use this set of xy pairs to draw a notched version

X Y
Min 1 3
Min 1 5
Min 1 4
25th 3 4
25th 3 7
TopNotchLeft 5.342592593 7
TopNotchMid 5.5 6.5
TopNotchRight 5.657407407 7
75th 8 7
75th 8 1
BottomNotchRight 5.657407407 1
BottomNotchMid 5.5 1.5
BottomNotchLeft 5.342592593 1
25th 3 1
25th 3 4
Skip
Median 5.5 1.5
Median 5.5 6.5
Skip
75th 8 4
Max 10 4
Max 10 5
Max 10 3

The formula for X value of NotchLeft is
=MEDIAN($A$1:$A$50)-(1.7*((1.25*(PERCENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.75)-PERCENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.25))/(1.35*50))))

The formula for X value of NotchRight is
=MEDIAN($A$1:$A$50)+(1.7*((1.25*(PERCENTILE($A$1:$ A$50,0.75)-PERCENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.25))/(1.35*50))))

All other formula are as William W. Dorner's example.

Cheers
Andy

wrote:
On Jun 15, 8:47 am, Andy Pope wrote:

Hi,

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.

Cheers
Andy



wrote:

Does anyone know how to create the notches in the verticalboxwhisker
charts?

An example can be found in figure 10 of the following article:

http://www.qualitydigest.com/oct97/html/excel.html

Thank you!!- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -


Can you elaborate on the technique?

On Jun 16, 8:27 am, Andy Pope wrote:
Use this set of xy pairs to draw a notched version

X Y
Min 1 3
Min 1 5
Min 1 4
25th 3 4
25th 3 7
TopNotchLeft 5.342592593 7
TopNotchMid 5.5 6.5
TopNotchRight 5.657407407 7
75th 8 7
75th 8 1
BottomNotchRight 5.657407407 1
BottomNotchMid 5.5 1.5
BottomNotchLeft 5.342592593 1
25th 3 1
25th 3 4
Skip
Median 5.5 1.5
Median 5.5 6.5
Skip
75th 8 4
Max 10 4
Max 10 5
Max 10 3

The formula for X value of NotchLeft is
=MEDIAN($A$1:$A$50)-(1.7*((1.25*(PERCENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.75)-PERCENTILE($A$*1:$A$50,0.25))/(1.35*50))))

The formula for X value of NotchRight is
=MEDIAN($A$1:$A$50)+(1.7*((1.25*(PERCENTILE($A$1:$ A$50,0.75)-PERCENTILE($A$*1:$A$50,0.25))/(1.35*50))))

All other formula are as William W. Dorner's example.

Cheers
Andy



wrote:
On Jun 15, 8:47 am, Andy Pope wrote:

Hi,

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.

Cheers
Andy

wrote:

Does anyone know how to create the notches in the verticalboxwhisker
charts?

An example can be found in figure 10 of the following article:

http://www.qualitydigest.com/oct97/html/excel.html

Thank you!!- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Can you elaborate on the technique?- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

You ROCK!!!

On Sat, 16 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Andy Pope said:

The formula for X value of NotchLeft is
=MEDIAN($A$1:$A$50)-(1.7*((1.25*(PERCENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.75)-PERC
ENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.25))/(1.35*50))))

The formula for X value of NotchRight is
=MEDIAN($A$1:$A$50)+(1.7*((1.25*(PERCENTILE($A$1: $A$50,0.75)-PERC
ENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.25))/(1.35*50))))

Any particular reason for preferring
PERCENTILE(<range,0.75)-PERCENTILE(<range,0.25)
to
QUARTILE(<range,3)-QUARTILE(<range,1)
?

(I'm such a fond user of quartiles that I sometimes use them instead on
MIN, MAX and MEDIAN, because the five values are so simple to copy down
a column next to the numbers 0-4)

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to ,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

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
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to ,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

Hi Del,

No preference just using the same formula as the example the OP was having
problems with.

Cheers
Andy

--

Andy Pope, Microsoft MVP - Excel
http://www.andypope.info
"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 16 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Andy Pope said:

The formula for X value of NotchLeft is
=MEDIAN($A$1:$A$50)-(1.7*((1.25*(PERCENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.75)-PERC
ENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.25))/(1.35*50))))

The formula for X value of NotchRight is
=MEDIAN($A$1:$A$50)+(1.7*((1.25*(PERCENTILE($A$1 :$A$50,0.75)-PERC
ENTILE($A$1:$A$50,0.25))/(1.35*50))))

Any particular reason for preferring
PERCENTILE(<range,0.75)-PERCENTILE(<range,0.25)
to
QUARTILE(<range,3)-QUARTILE(<range,1)
?

(I'm such a fond user of quartiles that I sometimes use them instead on
MIN, MAX and MEDIAN, because the five values are so simple to copy down
a column next to the numbers 0-4)

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Andy Pope said:
No preference just using the same formula as the example the OP was
having problems with.

Oops! I hadn't noticed the Excel formula example in the article; I
thought you were starting from scratch following the principles in the
article. Sorry.

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to ,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

Del -

Your chart allows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I suspect
it may become cluttered, and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and forces a
lot of back and forth between the chart and the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

The box plot is pretty much self-explanatory especially since it is
familiar, and the difference between the box itself and the whiskers is
immediately recognizable (compared to your multiple error bars colored
different shades of gray, which is slower to be interpreted). If you could
make whiskers of various line lengths, that might help.

I agree that the notched box plot must be rather obscure, as I've never seen
it used in any real display of information.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
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
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

Duh, every now and then even proved experts (even with a degree in
statistics) say something that leaves me deeply perplexed.

Less than five minutes of googling reveals these five fine examples:

- Exhibit 1 (electronics / mobile phone manufacturing, 1996)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel3/4031...rnumber=561268

- Exhibit 2 (experimental / cognitive psychology, 1996)
http://faculty.washington.edu/jmiyam...f%20pref. pdf

- Exhibit 3 (physical anthropology / monkeys, 2002)
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/FAE/CBR2002AJPA.pdf

- Exhibit 4 (entomology / PhD thesis on honeybee parasites, 1994)
[I mean, I've published in truly numerous fields of medicine, psychology,
statistics, computer science, nuclear physics, physiotherapy, management,
phylosophy and more and what not, but is this topic exotic or what?!]
http://doc.rero.ch/lm.php?url=1000,4...se_RickliM.pdf

- Exhibit 5 (a physicist teaching maths presenting grade distribution at an
exam, 2006/7)
[trust me from plenty of experience with such people that being a physicist
and/or teaching mathematics otherwise tends to preclude knowledge and
understanding of statistics]
http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~ob/MAS2...docs/stats.pdf

[if URLs are broken across lines, please put them together in your browser]

Note that I've selected only freely downloadable publications, while from an
academic institution with subscription to various online services from major
scientific publishers there are literaly dozens more readily available
examples!

Of course, your definition of "real display of information" might exclude
any kind of scientific or even technical publication, thus meaning only
"business" stuff and the general press. (Though I sincerly hope that it is
not what you meant.) In that case, my objection should be disregarded.

Regards,

Gaj Vidmar, PhD
Univ. of Ljubljana, Fac. of Medicine, Inst. of Biomedical Informatics

"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Del -

Your chart allows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I
suspect
it may become cluttered, and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and forces
a
lot of back and forth between the chart and the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

The box plot is pretty much self-explanatory especially since it is
familiar, and the difference between the box itself and the whiskers is
immediately recognizable (compared to your multiple error bars colored
different shades of gray, which is slower to be interpreted). If you could
make whiskers of various line lengths, that might help.

I agree that the notched box plot must be rather obscure, as I've never
seen
it used in any real display of information.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
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
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

Gaj -

I'm not an entomologist, nor have I read much on the anthropology of
monkeys. I've worked in scientific research as a metallurgist (for my
doctorate and a dozen years of employment following that), and as an
engineer in manufacturing. Maybe not the widest mathematical background, and
I'm not degreed in statistics (though I've taken a graduate level course or
three). I've encountered thousands of box and whisker charts and their
variants, but I've never seen a notched box chart used in the heat of
battle.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Gaj Vidmar" wrote in message
...
Duh, every now and then even proved experts (even with a degree in
statistics) say something that leaves me deeply perplexed.

Less than five minutes of googling reveals these five fine examples:

- Exhibit 1 (electronics / mobile phone manufacturing, 1996)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel3/4031...rnumber=561268

- Exhibit 2 (experimental / cognitive psychology, 1996)
http://faculty.washington.edu/jmiyam...f%20pref. pdf

- Exhibit 3 (physical anthropology / monkeys, 2002)
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/FAE/CBR2002AJPA.pdf

- Exhibit 4 (entomology / PhD thesis on honeybee parasites, 1994)
[I mean, I've published in truly numerous fields of medicine, psychology,
statistics, computer science, nuclear physics, physiotherapy, management,
phylosophy and more and what not, but is this topic exotic or what?!]
http://doc.rero.ch/lm.php?url=1000,4...se_RickliM.pdf

- Exhibit 5 (a physicist teaching maths presenting grade distribution at
an
exam, 2006/7)
[trust me from plenty of experience with such people that being a
physicist
and/or teaching mathematics otherwise tends to preclude knowledge and
understanding of statistics]
http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~ob/MAS2...docs/stats.pdf

[if URLs are broken across lines, please put them together in your
browser]

Note that I've selected only freely downloadable publications, while from
an
academic institution with subscription to various online services from
major
scientific publishers there are literaly dozens more readily available
examples!

Of course, your definition of "real display of information" might exclude
any kind of scientific or even technical publication, thus meaning only
"business" stuff and the general press. (Though I sincerly hope that it is
not what you meant.) In that case, my objection should be disregarded.

Regards,

Gaj Vidmar, PhD
Univ. of Ljubljana, Fac. of Medicine, Inst. of Biomedical Informatics

"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Del -

Your chart allows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I
suspect
it may become cluttered, and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and
forces
a
lot of back and forth between the chart and the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

The box plot is pretty much self-explanatory especially since it is
familiar, and the difference between the box itself and the whiskers is
immediately recognizable (compared to your multiple error bars colored
different shades of gray, which is slower to be interpreted). If you
could
make whiskers of various line lengths, that might help.

I agree that the notched box plot must be rather obscure, as I've never
seen
it used in any real display of information.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
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
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

Duh, duh, exhibits ignored, personal defensive stance taken, while my aim
was quite the opposite (I thought it was obvious, but apparently ...).

Anyway, my point was and is that notched boxplots *ARE* used in "real
display of information", "heat of the battle" or whatever one calls that --
at least every now and then.

To add to the ignored exhibits (deliberately as diverse as I could find -- I
thought it was obvious that wide as my interest and experience may be,
neither am I an entomologist or anthropologist, but apparently ...), they
are not exceedingly rare in medical articles.

Related to that, I remember MedCalc (www.medcalc.be, a
clinician-not-statistician oriented package) being praised in a software
review in a medical journal for producing them. And Minitab produces them
also, which has a reputation of "canning" only the actually used methods
rather than as many as possible in comparison to some other stats packages.

Anyway, precisely the attention of Excel experts (Pope, Cotter, Peltier; be
the attitude positive or negative) or even my own rant in an Excel forum
might make them less "obscure" for the "general public".

Now, if that does eventually happen, a further point worth mentioning is the
problem with what the whole point of the notches is, i.e., visually
assessing whether medians are [statistically significantly] different.
Namely, just like with error bars representing confidence interval for mean,
once you compare more than two samples, you run into the problem of multiple
comparisons ...

A publicly available reference from statistics education (BTW, full of
notched boxplots :o) mentioning this is
http://www.amstat.org/publications/j...2/garrett.html
(Note that the main point is comparing variability rather then centre, so
the variable being plotted in Fig. 2 is absolute deviation from the median;
the key quote is "Groups for which the boxplot notch intervals do not
overlap are likely different in variability. (Here we encounter once again
the multiple comparison issue.)"

So, to summarise, if the aim is inference, perhaps the notches should be
appropriately <shortened to compensate for multiple comparisons, i.e.,
prevent inflated type I error ('false alarms' in layman terms). Sort of like
the basic idea of Analysis of Means (ANOM) as a graphical alternative to
ANOVA.

Anyway, this is an Excel forum, not a statistical one (though, fortunately,
with precisely those experts I mentioned above, and some others, "under the
surface" actually making it mainly quite statistically sound). So, please,
Dr. Peltier, Mr. Cotter and others, take this just as praise and inspiration
for your knowledge and talents and good will to take notched boxplots into
account, and perhaps also ANOM.

To push thins further, both are, IMHO, among the many candidates for an
ambitious projects of a publicly available Excel "charting" add-in (perhaps
we should buzz-call it InfoVis add-in) ... Especially with Excel 2007 still
leaving so many thing to be desried in this department ...

-- I know that you, Dr. Peltier, have already done *A LOT* of great work in
this direction, but I'm just abusing this oportunity to ask you (and
others -- Mr. Cinquegrani comes to my mind first, and also Mr. O'Day) to
think how much time and funding this would take. -- Namely, for a while I've
been baldly thinking of an applied scientific project (with EU funding,
which can be seriously substantial; you <do most of the work, I <take care
of the scientific references and pompous justification to actually get the
project), and even Microsoft support is not unrealistic ... -- If you think
it's an uterly silly idea, or that the last thing you need is my advice and
co-operation, please, let me know, and likewise if you think it's not so
silly. It might even happen at some point after you will have finished and
successfully marketed your commercial add-in for a while -- the project and
funding could perhaps just make the add-in more comprehensive and compensate
for making it public domain.

Anyway, enough of digressions. Please, take the things I write utterly
benevolently -- like they are *ALWAYS* meant.

Cordial regrads,

Gaj

"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Gaj -

I'm not an entomologist, nor have I read much on the anthropology of
monkeys. I've worked in scientific research as a metallurgist (for my
doctorate and a dozen years of employment following that), and as an
engineer in manufacturing. Maybe not the widest mathematical background,
and
I'm not degreed in statistics (though I've taken a graduate level course
or
three). I've encountered thousands of box and whisker charts and their
variants, but I've never seen a notched box chart used in the heat of
battle.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Gaj Vidmar" wrote in message
...
Duh, every now and then even proved experts (even with a degree in
statistics) say something that leaves me deeply perplexed.

Less than five minutes of googling reveals these five fine examples:

- Exhibit 1 (electronics / mobile phone manufacturing, 1996)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel3/4031...rnumber=561268

- Exhibit 2 (experimental / cognitive psychology, 1996)

http://faculty.washington.edu/jmiyam...f%20pref. pdf

- Exhibit 3 (physical anthropology / monkeys, 2002)
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/FAE/CBR2002AJPA.pdf

- Exhibit 4 (entomology / PhD thesis on honeybee parasites, 1994)
[I mean, I've published in truly numerous fields of medicine,
psychology,
statistics, computer science, nuclear physics, physiotherapy,
management,
phylosophy and more and what not, but is this topic exotic or what?!]

http://doc.rero.ch/lm.php?url=1000,4...se_RickliM.pdf

- Exhibit 5 (a physicist teaching maths presenting grade distribution at
an
exam, 2006/7)
[trust me from plenty of experience with such people that being a
physicist
and/or teaching mathematics otherwise tends to preclude knowledge and
understanding of statistics]
http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~ob/MAS2...docs/stats.pdf

[if URLs are broken across lines, please put them together in your
browser]

Note that I've selected only freely downloadable publications, while
from
an
academic institution with subscription to various online services from
major
scientific publishers there are literaly dozens more readily available
examples!

Of course, your definition of "real display of information" might
exclude
any kind of scientific or even technical publication, thus meaning only
"business" stuff and the general press. (Though I sincerly hope that it
is
not what you meant.) In that case, my objection should be disregarded.

Regards,

Gaj Vidmar, PhD
Univ. of Ljubljana, Fac. of Medicine, Inst. of Biomedical Informatics

"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Del -

Your chart allows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I
suspect
it may become cluttered, and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and
forces
a
lot of back and forth between the chart and the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

The box plot is pretty much self-explanatory especially since it is
familiar, and the difference between the box itself and the whiskers is
immediately recognizable (compared to your multiple error bars colored
different shades of gray, which is slower to be interpreted). If you
could
make whiskers of various line lengths, that might help.

I agree that the notched box plot must be rather obscure, as I've never
seen
it used in any real display of information.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
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
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3
instead.

On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Jon Peltier said:
Your chart allows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I suspect
it may become cluttered,

Possibly, but the example I showed was bound to look a little cluttered
compared to a simple pair of notched boxes, due to the sheer number of
data points on that graph, and my not taking the trouble to clean up the
legend. This version looks less cluttered, I hope.

http://i146.photobucket.com/
albums/r264/del_c/infographics/not_boxplot2.gif

and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and forces a
lot of back and forth between the chart and the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

Very true.

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to ,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

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.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Jon Peltier said:
Your chart allows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I
suspect
it may become cluttered,

Possibly, but the example I showed was bound to look a little cluttered
compared to a simple pair of notched boxes, due to the sheer number of
data points on that graph, and my not taking the trouble to clean up the
legend. This version looks less cluttered, I hope.

http://i146.photobucket.com/
albums/r264/del_c/infographics/not_boxplot2.gif

and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and forces a
lot of back and forth between the chart and the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

Very true.

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

Hi Gaj -

I took what you said as cordial, and was just trying to indicate that while
such features as notches in a box plot might be useful and common in some
disciplines, my experience did not include such features. I must need to
adjust my medications, however, as a few times in the past month or so I've
been accused of being defensive or offensive, and that is never my
intention. I apologize for the brusqueness of my post.


The idea of constructing a large utility to overcome the shortfalls within
Excel has occurred to me. But it is a rather large undertaking, and I have
only been able to whittle away in my spare time at its edges, with my
tutorials and more recently with a handful of utilities. I have given some
thought to notched bar charts in the past despite never using them. Andy's
technique to draw the outlines of such a chart with an XY series is
interesting, but how does one fill the outline? I have also thought of using
trapezoids as a custom series fill for two additional series in the chart.
However, the nice matching of custom shapes that I remember from Excel 97
has become a more fuzzy matchup in recent releases (in 2003 and I'm sure
more so in 2007). So I've put my ideas on the back burner.

Emails from a dozen users of my Box and Whisker utility have requested the
display of outliers, while none have mentioned the notched bars. So in fact,
I've got the outlier feature mostly coded but not debugged, so it's not yet
ready for serious work.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Gaj Vidmar" wrote in message
...
Duh, duh, exhibits ignored, personal defensive stance taken, while my aim
was quite the opposite (I thought it was obvious, but apparently ...).

Anyway, my point was and is that notched boxplots *ARE* used in "real
display of information", "heat of the battle" or whatever one calls
that --
at least every now and then.

To add to the ignored exhibits (deliberately as diverse as I could find --
I
thought it was obvious that wide as my interest and experience may be,
neither am I an entomologist or anthropologist, but apparently ...), they
are not exceedingly rare in medical articles.

Related to that, I remember MedCalc (www.medcalc.be, a
clinician-not-statistician oriented package) being praised in a software
review in a medical journal for producing them. And Minitab produces them
also, which has a reputation of "canning" only the actually used methods
rather than as many as possible in comparison to some other stats
packages.

Anyway, precisely the attention of Excel experts (Pope, Cotter, Peltier;
be
the attitude positive or negative) or even my own rant in an Excel forum
might make them less "obscure" for the "general public".

Now, if that does eventually happen, a further point worth mentioning is
the
problem with what the whole point of the notches is, i.e., visually
assessing whether medians are [statistically significantly] different.
Namely, just like with error bars representing confidence interval for
mean,
once you compare more than two samples, you run into the problem of
multiple
comparisons ...

A publicly available reference from statistics education (BTW, full of
notched boxplots :o) mentioning this is
http://www.amstat.org/publications/j...2/garrett.html
(Note that the main point is comparing variability rather then centre, so
the variable being plotted in Fig. 2 is absolute deviation from the
median;
the key quote is "Groups for which the boxplot notch intervals do not
overlap are likely different in variability. (Here we encounter once again
the multiple comparison issue.)"

So, to summarise, if the aim is inference, perhaps the notches should be
appropriately <shortened to compensate for multiple comparisons, i.e.,
prevent inflated type I error ('false alarms' in layman terms). Sort of
like
the basic idea of Analysis of Means (ANOM) as a graphical alternative to
ANOVA.

Anyway, this is an Excel forum, not a statistical one (though,
fortunately,
with precisely those experts I mentioned above, and some others, "under
the
surface" actually making it mainly quite statistically sound). So, please,
Dr. Peltier, Mr. Cotter and others, take this just as praise and
inspiration
for your knowledge and talents and good will to take notched boxplots into
account, and perhaps also ANOM.

To push thins further, both are, IMHO, among the many candidates for an
ambitious projects of a publicly available Excel "charting" add-in
(perhaps
we should buzz-call it InfoVis add-in) ... Especially with Excel 2007
still
leaving so many thing to be desried in this department ...

-- I know that you, Dr. Peltier, have already done *A LOT* of great work
in
this direction, but I'm just abusing this oportunity to ask you (and
others -- Mr. Cinquegrani comes to my mind first, and also Mr. O'Day) to
think how much time and funding this would take. -- Namely, for a while
I've
been baldly thinking of an applied scientific project (with EU funding,
which can be seriously substantial; you <do most of the work, I <take
care
of the scientific references and pompous justification to actually get the
project), and even Microsoft support is not unrealistic ... -- If you
think
it's an uterly silly idea, or that the last thing you need is my advice
and
co-operation, please, let me know, and likewise if you think it's not so
silly. It might even happen at some point after you will have finished and
successfully marketed your commercial add-in for a while -- the project
and
funding could perhaps just make the add-in more comprehensive and
compensate
for making it public domain.

Anyway, enough of digressions. Please, take the things I write utterly
benevolently -- like they are *ALWAYS* meant.

Cordial regrads,

Gaj

"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Gaj -

I'm not an entomologist, nor have I read much on the anthropology of
monkeys. I've worked in scientific research as a metallurgist (for my
doctorate and a dozen years of employment following that), and as an
engineer in manufacturing. Maybe not the widest mathematical background,
and
I'm not degreed in statistics (though I've taken a graduate level course
or
three). I've encountered thousands of box and whisker charts and their
variants, but I've never seen a notched box chart used in the heat of
battle.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Gaj Vidmar" wrote in message
...
Duh, every now and then even proved experts (even with a degree in
statistics) say something that leaves me deeply perplexed.

Less than five minutes of googling reveals these five fine examples:

- Exhibit 1 (electronics / mobile phone manufacturing, 1996)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel3/4031...rnumber=561268

- Exhibit 2 (experimental / cognitive psychology, 1996)

http://faculty.washington.edu/jmiyam...f%20pref. pdf

- Exhibit 3 (physical anthropology / monkeys, 2002)
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/FAE/CBR2002AJPA.pdf

- Exhibit 4 (entomology / PhD thesis on honeybee parasites, 1994)
[I mean, I've published in truly numerous fields of medicine,
psychology,
statistics, computer science, nuclear physics, physiotherapy,
management,
phylosophy and more and what not, but is this topic exotic or what?!]

http://doc.rero.ch/lm.php?url=1000,4...se_RickliM.pdf

- Exhibit 5 (a physicist teaching maths presenting grade distribution
at
an
exam, 2006/7)
[trust me from plenty of experience with such people that being a
physicist
and/or teaching mathematics otherwise tends to preclude knowledge and
understanding of statistics]
http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~ob/MAS2...docs/stats.pdf

[if URLs are broken across lines, please put them together in your
browser]

Note that I've selected only freely downloadable publications, while
from
an
academic institution with subscription to various online services from
major
scientific publishers there are literaly dozens more readily available
examples!

Of course, your definition of "real display of information" might
exclude
any kind of scientific or even technical publication, thus meaning only
"business" stuff and the general press. (Though I sincerly hope that it
is
not what you meant.) In that case, my objection should be disregarded.

Regards,

Gaj Vidmar, PhD
Univ. of Ljubljana, Fac. of Medicine, Inst. of Biomedical Informatics

"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Del -

Your chart allows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I
suspect
it may become cluttered, and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and
forces
a
lot of back and forth between the chart and the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

The box plot is pretty much self-explanatory especially since it is
familiar, and the difference between the box itself and the whiskers
is
immediately recognizable (compared to your multiple error bars colored
different shades of gray, which is slower to be interpreted). If you
could
make whiskers of various line lengths, that might help.

I agree that the notched box plot must be rather obscure, as I've
never
seen
it used in any real display of information.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


"Del Cotter" wrote in message
...
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
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3
instead.

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.

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to ,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

Del -

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.

I don't mean to be arguing, I was thinking of an alternative to the notch
that fits within the constraints of the box chart. I'm not wild about the
notch construction, and your observation about the width and depth of the
notch touches on my unfamiliarity with it. I had in mind a version with a
new rectangle in the middle of the stack to replace the notch, which keeps
the focus on heights and not on widths.

I understand now your intention to give users a choice not to hassle with
the extensive mechanics of box chart creation. You're right: the boxes are
not required. The challenge as always is to display the information clearly.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, in microsoft.public.excel.charting,
Jon Peltier said:
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.

I'm not wild about the notch construction, and your observation about
the width and depth of the notch touches on my unfamiliarity with it. I
had in mind a version with a new rectangle in the middle of the stack
to replace the notch, which keeps the focus on heights and not on widths.

Yes! new rectangle in the middle of the stack would work for me, with
ticks at the centre point of that to mark the median.

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to ,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.

On Jun 19, 8:26 am, "Jon Peltier"
wrote:
Del -

Yourchartallows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I suspect
it may become cluttered, and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and forces a
lot of back and forth between thechartand the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

Theboxplot is pretty much self-explanatory especially since it is
familiar, and the difference between theboxitself and the whiskers is
immediately recognizable (compared to your multiple error bars colored
different shades of gray, which is slower to be interpreted). If you could
make whiskers of various line lengths, that might help.

I agree that the notchedboxplot must be rather obscure, as I've never seen
it used in any real display of information.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier,MicrosoftExcelMVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. -http://PeltierTech.com
_______

"Del Cotter" wrote in message

...



On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, inmicrosoft.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 inExcel
immediately gets a lot easier. Here's my idea of a boxless "box" and
whiskerdistributionchart, with circled outliers and an error range
around the median, all just using the standardExcelsymbol 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 theExcelerror bars, to suit your
preferences, and I think the point comes across even though they're not
the traditional boxes.

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3 instead.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Wow!! I did not know my initial request generated such an exchange of
academic and technical passion. Just to let you know, I have decided
that if I need to generate a significant number of notched box whisker
charts, I am going to obtain the latest version of SigmaPlot (v 10
being the latest version) in order to generate them.

Jon, if your add-in can generate notched box whisker plots to the
scope and degree that SigmaPlot can, please let me know!!!

Bruce

Nope, I have not ever tried to generate notched box plots. There is no easy
way in an Excel chart to integrate a non-rectangular shape into the chart
series. I will give it further thought, of course, since other people find
it a more important feature than I thought it was.

If you want to show outliers as individual points outside the span of the
whiskers, stay tuned, because an unreleased version of the utility can
handle this.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______


wrote in message
ps.com...
On Jun 19, 8:26 am, "Jon Peltier"
wrote:
Del -

Yourchartallows plenty of different quantities to be shown, but I suspect
it may become cluttered, and at least for now, it's unfamiliar, and
forces a
lot of back and forth between thechartand the legend. Don't knock a
"familiar idiom".

Theboxplot is pretty much self-explanatory especially since it is
familiar, and the difference between theboxitself and the whiskers is
immediately recognizable (compared to your multiple error bars colored
different shades of gray, which is slower to be interpreted). If you
could
make whiskers of various line lengths, that might help.

I agree that the notchedboxplot must be rather obscure, as I've never
seen
it used in any real display of information.

- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier,MicrosoftExcelMVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. -http://PeltierTech.com
_______

"Del Cotter" wrote in message

...



On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, inmicrosoft.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 inExcel
immediately gets a lot easier. Here's my idea of a boxless "box" and
whiskerdistributionchart, with circled outliers and an error range
around the median, all just using the standardExcelsymbol 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 theExcelerror bars, to suit your
preferences, and I think the point comes across even though they're not
the traditional boxes.

--
Del Cotter
NB Personal replies to this post will send email to
,
which goes to a spam folder-- please send your email to del3
instead.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Wow!! I did not know my initial request generated such an exchange of
academic and technical passion. Just to let you know, I have decided
that if I need to generate a significant number of notched box whisker
charts, I am going to obtain the latest version of SigmaPlot (v 10
being the latest version) in order to generate them.

Jon, if your add-in can generate notched box whisker plots to the
scope and degree that SigmaPlot can, please let me know!!!

Bruce