Using Box Plots Differently

For those of us into performance consulting, Box plot (Know more about them here), is a wonderfully simple and efficient tool to help us get about our job. As every coin has two faces, every data-set has two aspects. One, is the "feel-good" part of it, the part which tells us about the successes and the top performers. Second, is the "ouch" bit of it, that gets us to notice the outliers.

Usually, the Box-and-Whisker diagram is used to plot and separate data as the smallest and largest values, the median, and the lower and the upper quartiles. But, the shape and the style of it can be applied to depict other sets of data as well. Here, I've used the B&W template to depict the monthly temperatures of my home city - Calcutta.

The necessary data was gathered from here and there. It included the data for record monthly highs and lows, which were depicted in the chart by the whiskers, and the average monthly range of normal temperature, which is represented by the box, and the average monthly temperature by the line. The maximum and the minimum temperature, of the months of a specific year, taken here as 2010, is represented as a range by the violet column to show its position vis-a-vis the Box and whisker graph.

The final look:

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Florence Nightingale Circumplex Chart

I was taken to the Florence Nightingale's Wiki page during a recent research, and one of the interesting things I noted was her contribution to statistics. It came to me as a pleasant surprise that she is credited with inventing the polar area diagram , or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, which is equivalent to a modern circular histogram. Following the completion of my project and in my weekend to spare, I devoted time to recreating the chart in Excel. It took a combination of Doughnut-Pie-and XY charts and close to four hours to finish it. The colours are a bit darker, the values are approximate and the labels differently oriented, yet the chart looks fairly close to the original as is shown by the picture below.

The Cricket Graphs: The Forgotten Chart

The fun of receiving feedback to blog posts is that one isn't quite sure what they might come up against. While mostly it provides fascinating discussions, insightful comments or explanatory questions, there is also the odd occasion when it throws up unusual requests. The other day I received an email in response to my post, The Cricket Graphs . The sender wanted me to create a "Partnership" chart, which would show the runs scored by the pair of batsmen for every wicket and the balls faced. I went searching for data on the Cricinfo website , and picked out the 3rd ODI between the South African and Australian cricket teams which was played out in Kingsmead, Durban on October 28, 2011. The Partnership details were taken from the page titled Partnerships Table and the total balls faced by individual batsmen from the Scorecard. Constructing the graphs was a somewhat tricky affair, with two potential bar charts in two axes representing Balls and Runs, which had me w...

The Playfair Charts: Scotland ExIm Barchart

Soon after finishing the second Playfair chart, the one on Wheat Price and Wages, I searched the internet for additional charts made by him. I found a Bar chart circa 1786, which showed the Scottish export and import volumes with other countries. For me, the real thrill was to scroll by the list of the name of places long consigned to history books - Jersey Is, Greenland, Prussia, Denmark and Norway (together) and Flanders. First, the original Playfair Barchart from Wikipedia, Then, my version of it in Excel. A couple of parting words: Excel 2007 no longer support dots and lines as fillers for charts. Hence, the ribbed import chart is given a different color, Gold. Normally, I'd use data point labels to construct the chart legends and other declarations given at the bottom of the chart. However, given Excel 2007' inability to automatically re-size labels to fit texts, I was forced to use text-boxes instead.

Somnath's Excel Charts

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