In Excel: select the numeric column(s) and choose Insert ▸ Insert Statistic Chart ▸ Box and Whisker — Excel computes the quartiles, median and outliers for you.
Put each group in its own column, with the group name in the header row — one column gives one box, four columns give four side-by-side boxes.
Select the data including the headers.
Choose Insert ▸ Insert Statistic Chart ▸ Box and Whisker.
Right-click a box and open Format Data Series to toggle "Show inner points", "Show outlier points" and "Show mean marker".
Under the same panel, pick Inclusive or Exclusive median to match the quartile convention your report uses.
What this does
A box and whisker plot (box plot) summarises a distribution with five numbers: minimum, first quartile, median, third quartile and maximum. The box spans the interquartile range, the line inside it is the median, the whiskers reach the furthest points within 1.5×IQR, and anything beyond that is drawn as an individual outlier dot. Excel 2016 and later ship it as a native chart type, so you no longer need the old stacked-bar workaround. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. Treat “make box whisker plot in excel” as a small repeatable workflow rather than a one-off click you hope to remember next time. Use a small test block before the live file, so any surprise in the affected cells shows up while it is still harmless. When this is a ribbon command, the selection matters more than the button: confirm the range, apply the command, then spot-check the output before saving. That turns a visual that makes the number obvious at a glance into a method you can reuse, explain, and defend when the workbook leaves your screen.
A worked example
A2:A41 holds 40 support-ticket resolution times in hours. Select A1:A41 and choose Insert ▸ Insert Statistic Chart ▸ Box and Whisker. If the box runs from 3 to 9 with a median line at 5, half of all tickets closed between 3 and 9 hours; a dot at 46 hours is flagged as an outlier rather than being averaged away. A box plot is the fastest honest way to compare several groups at once: it shows level, spread and outliers together, so a difference in averages is never presented without the variation behind it. If there is any chance you will reuse this, drop it into a small template tab right now: a labelled input area on the left and the formula beside it, checked once against the tool above. Next time the same question comes up, the answer is a single paste away instead of a rebuild from memory.
In Google Sheets
If you are in Google Sheets rather than Excel, the good news is that the formula shown here is identical and the workflow barely changes — menus sit across the top instead of in a ribbon, and a few function names differ slightly, but anything you build here moves across with little or no rework. Nothing on this page is behind a login: the tool runs entirely in your browser, the formula is shown in full with one-click copy, and the steps work the same on Windows and Mac. That is the whole promise here — the exact answer, a way to prove it on your own numbers, and just enough context to make it stick. If you take one thing from this page on “make box whisker plot in excel”, make it the habit rather than the keystrokes: set the problem up with labelled inputs, reference those cells, and let Excel do the recomputing. Bookmark the page for the syntax, but do the example once in a blank sheet and check it against the tool above — five minutes of hands-on practice fixes the method in memory far better than re-reading, and it surfaces the small snags while they are still harmless. After that the technique is genuinely yours: faster than searching for it again, and reliable enough to drop into work that other people depend on.
Common mistakes
- Building it from summary statistics instead of raw values — the chart needs the individual observations to compute quartiles itself.
- Comparing groups of very different sample sizes without saying so; a box drawn from 6 points looks as authoritative as one drawn from 600.
- Leaving the default Exclusive median when the rest of the analysis uses QUARTILE.INC, which shifts the box edges.
- Reading the whisker ends as the true minimum and maximum — they stop at 1.5×IQR, and points beyond are plotted separately.
Frequently asked questions
Which Excel versions have a box and whisker chart?
Excel 2016 and later on Windows and Mac, plus Microsoft 365. In Excel 2013 or earlier you have to fake it with a stacked column chart and custom error bars.
What do the dots above the whisker mean?
They are outliers — values more than 1.5 times the interquartile range beyond the box edge. Excel plots them individually so they are not hidden inside the whisker.
Box plot or histogram?
A box plot compares several distributions side by side in a small space; a histogram shows the shape of one distribution in detail. Use a box plot when the question is "which group is higher and more variable".
How do I show the average as well as the median?
Right-click the series, open Format Data Series and tick "Show mean marker" — Excel adds an × at the arithmetic mean alongside the median line.
Other ways people ask this
On the way here you may have searched this as “how to make a box whisker plot in excel”, “how to create box whisker plot in excel” and “make box whisker plot excel” — it is all the same task, and this page is the single, complete answer to it.
Why do people search for this in so many different ways?
Because the same task has many names. “how to make a box whisker plot in excel”, “how to create box whisker plot in excel”, “make box whisker plot excel” all point at the one operation explained on this page, which is why they all lead here.