Help needed with Median If in Excel

Question

I need to return a median of only a certain category on a spread sheet. Example Below

Airline    5
Auto       20
Auto       3
Bike       12
Airline    12
Airline    39

ect.

How can I write a formula to only return a median value of the Airline Categories. Similar to Average if, only for median. I cannot re-arrange the values. Thank you!

Solution 1

Assuming your categories are in cells A1:A6 and the corresponding values are in B1:B6, you might try typing the formula =MEDIAN(IF($A$1:$A$6="Airline",$B$1:$B$6,"")) in another cell and then pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER.

Using CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER tells Excel to treat the formula as an "array formula". In this example, that means that the IF statement returns an array of 6 values (one of each of the cells in the range $A$1:$A$6) instead of a single value. The MEDIAN function then returns the median of these values. See http://www.cpearson.com/excel/arrayformulas.aspx for a similar example using AVERAGE instead of MEDIAN.

Solution 2

Make a third column that has values like:

=IF(A1="Airline",B1)

=IF(A2="Airline",B2) etc

Then just perform a median on the new column.

Solution 3

Expanding on Brian Camire's Answer:

Using =MEDIAN(IF($A$1:$A$6="Airline",$B$1:$B$6,"")) with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER will include blank cells in the calculation. Blank cells will be evaluated as 0 which results in a lower median value. The same is true if using the average funtion. If you don't want to include blank cells in the calculation, use a nested if statement like so:

=MEDIAN(IF($A$1:$A$6="Airline",IF($B$1:$B$6<>"",$B$1:$B$6)))

Don't forget to press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to treat the formula as an "array formula".

Comments

[Piotrek]

Can you tell me what CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER does here? I get different values if I press this shortcut and if I don't. I'm trying to learn which value is correct

[Przemyslaw Remin]

@Piotrek change for a short while the formula from MEDIAN to SUM and you will understand how it works. The shortcut shift+cntr+enter makes the IF work. If you do not press it then it calculates the formula for entire range.