Box Plots

The box plot (or box-and-whisker plot) provides a visualisation of the key statistics for a dataset in one diagram.

Select a Numeric column to display, enabling Log scale if it helps to visualise the data more clearly.

If the table includes category data, you can also set the Category column to one of the available category columns to help visualise the data grouped by category. Select which categories to include in the box plot using the Categories list.

You can also use a pre-defined Query filter to limit the data included in the chart.

Note these features of the plot:

  • The mean is indicated by the red diamond.
  • The median is indicated by the line that crosses the inside of the box.
  • The box encloses the interquartile range around the median.
  • The whiskers extend out to lines that mark the extents you select, which can be the Min/Max whiskers, the Outer fence whiskers or the Inner fence whiskers. Outer and inner values are defined as being three times the interquartile range and 1.5 times the interquartile range respectively.

Note that a reminder of the reference for the Outer fence whiskers and Inner fence whiskers can be found by holding your mouse cursor over these fields to see the tooltip.

For convenience, there is a statistics table provided in the corner of the box plot window.

A box plot window for a block model has some additional fields at the top not present on the box plot statistics window for other objects. There is a Statistics weighting option that can be set to Un-weighted, Volume-weighted or Mass-weighted, and a Density option that can be set to Constant or a data column containing density data. There is also an Additional weighting field which allows the selection of another numeric column to use for scaling, such as declustering weights or stored proportions. If the numeric column selected is not a stored proportion, set the Weighting unit column to Decimal or Percentage as appropriate for the selected data.

Saving a Box Plot

Click the Save button () to add the box plot to the Saved Statistics folder.

This will create a copy of the box plot with a default name. You can then modify the name of the plot so you can more easily find it in the Saved Statistics folder. You can also switch back to the original box plot and make further changes, then save additional versions of the plot to the Saved Statistics folder.

Once saved to the Saved Statistics folder, subsequent changes to the plot are automatically saved.

Styling Elements in a Box Plot

You can change the size of various elements of the box plot, such as the sizes of different labels. To do this, click the Edit reporting display settings button ():

By default, the box plot will use the global graph settings. For more information, see Graphs Settings.

If you tick the Use local graph settings box, the sliders will adjust the chart features for the box plot currently open.

Exporting a Box Plot

Box plots can be exported as PDF, SVG and PNG files. Click the Export button (), then specify a filename and select the file type you prefer.

Alternatively, you can click the Copy button () then select Copy Graph Image; an image of the plot will be added to the clipboard. You can then paste the image from the clipboard into another application.