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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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

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 Dorling Cartogram

My last project involved using a multitude of regions for drawing analysis, parallels and comparison. Not wanting to use yet another Choropleth graph, I decided to look up alternatives that were easier to create and preferably required no VBA. Soon I stumbled upon "The Dorling Cartogram", defined in the UCSB site as, "This type of cartogram was named after its inventor, Danny Dorling of the University of Leeds. A Dorling cartogram maintains neither shape, topology nor object centroids, though it has proven to be a very effective cartogram method. To create a Dorling cartogram, instead of enlarging or shrinking the objects themselves, the cartographer will replace the objects with a uniform shape, usually a circle, of the appropriate size." I had the data for Obesity in the United States handy, so I decided to give it a try before using it in my project. I opted to use Bubble charts because data points within a series may need to be of varied shapes based on

Somnath's Excel Charts

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