Excel Instructions: Boxplot

To open Excel with the data in the worksheet, click here and it will automatically download the file to your computer. Find the downloaded file (usually in the Downloads folder) and double-click it to open it in Excel.

Descriptive Statistics:

In the last Learn By Doing exercise, we calculated descriptive statistics for our entire dataset. This time, we want to calculate descriptive statistics for each college and then create side-by-side boxplots to compare the colleges graphically.

To start, we'll create a table that will list each statistical measure and the value for each college. When you are done, your table should look like this:


Now for each statistic, we'll enter the formula to calculate that statistic and the range of data that corresponds to each college:

Side-by-Side Boxplots:

Unfortunately, Excel can't create boxplots directly, so we have to create a column graph and alter it so that we get boxplots. We start by using our Descriptive Statistics to create a new table that will be the basis for our column graph. When you are done, your table should look like this:


Now we can finally create our boxplots: