The upper whisker starts at Q 3 and extends upward to Q 3+1.5(IQR) or the maximum value, whichever is lower.Because of the ease of calculation, the convention for the length of the whisker that I have used in the box plot template comes from : The whiskers can be created using error bars in Excel. The whiskers in a plot represent the tails of the distribution. The area property is set to none for these two series to create just the outline for the box. These two series, stacked together make up the interquartile range. The first series (bottom column) is Q1 and the border and area properties are set to none so that the column is not visible in the chart. The plot in Excel is created using a stacked column chart with 3 series. If the median is closer to Q1, the distribution is positively skewed. if the median is closer to Q3, the distribution is negatively skewed (or 'skewed to the left' meaning the left tail of the distribution is longer). If the distribution is symmetric, the median will be exactly in the middle.

The location of the median line relative to the first and third quartiles indicates the amount of skewness or asymmetry in the data. It appears that the older PERCENTILE and QUARTILE functions are the same as PERCENTILE.INC and QUARTILE.INC functions. Note: To exclude the median when calculating the quartiles, you can use the new PERCENTILE.EXC and QUARTILE.EXC functions. The mean is not always displayed in a box plot, but in the new built-in Box and Whisker Chart for Excel 2016+, it is shown as an 'x'.

Calculate the mean using AVERAGE( range).

Calculate the interquartile range (IQR) as Q 3-Q 1.

Find the third quartile, Q 3, using =QUARTILE( range,3) or =PERCENTILE( range,0.75).

Find the median, Q 2, using =MEDIAN( range) or QUARTILE( range,2) or =PERCENTILE( range,0.5).

Find the first quartile, Q 1, using =QUARTILE( range,1) or =PERCENTILE( range,0.25).You may want to check out my article on percentiles for more details about how percentiles are calculated. The upper edge of the box plot is the third quartile or 75th percentile. The lower edge of the box plot is the first quartile or 25th percentile. The box part of a box and whisker plot represents the central 50% of the data or the Interquartile Range (IQR).

An example box and whisker plot from the Box Plot Template showing the IQR, whiskers, and max/min outliers.

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