

The five-number summary is the minimum, first quartile, median, third quartile, and the maximum.

Simply expressed, the lower whisker represents the bottom 25. While the box plot is an interesting visualisation, it is important to understand the audience as they might not know what you are trying to show them. A boxplot (sometimes called a box-and-whisker plot) is a plot that shows the five-number summary of a dataset. A box-and-whisker graph or box plot is a convenient way of comparing groups of numerical data. The box plot will rarely look this perfect, however it will still show how our data is distributed and give us some context behind any interesting analysis that we can begin to explore. The graph represents a normal distribution in a data set, with the σ symbol representing a standard distribution. This picture is quite intimidating, but it is just another way of visualising what our box plot is breaking down. In a Box and Whisker chart, numerical data is divided into quartiles and a box is drawn between the first and third quartiles, with an additional line drawn. The box and whisker plot maker creates a box plot chart for several samples with customization options like vertical/horizontal, size, colors, min, max. Any of the points beyond these whiskers can be classified as outliers, and might be worth exploring This will help us understand how skewed our data is, and in which direction.

The lines coming out of the box (known as the whiskers) extent within x1.5 this inter-quartile range. The box is then closed by the upper and lower quartiles meaning that the box will be spanning our inter-quartile range, or the middle 50% of our data. Our centre point for this will be the median (middle value) in our data, not the mean. Don't forget to set your marks to circle. If you want to create one from scratch then you will need a measure broken down by a dimension, followed by dragging in the Box Plot in the analytics pane (see example below). This chart type will be one of the few times that you would want to use the show me function in Tableau Desktop, as it can be quite tricky to set this up. The box and whisker plot can be a little confusing to explain in a dashboard, so I will try and summarize the key points. Box plots are a great way of showing the distribution of our data, as well as spotting any outliers.
