Box and whisker plots?

Question

Is there a formula or something that could take a box and whisker plot and turn it into a set of numbers? For example a minimum of 142 and a maximum of 169 and the quartiles being Q1=145, Q2=146.5, Q3=154.5 into 12 numbers. Or any formulas in Microsoft Excel 2007 would help too. Thanks

Answer 1

The whole point of box and whisker plots is that they summarize the data: they lose the details to make the important information clearer. There is no going back.

In general, for N unknowns, you need N equations. You only have 5.

If you want to create fake data that has the same summary values as the box and whisker plot, then you can do it. But there are countless combinations of 12 numbers with the same summary, so why would you want to?