MEDIAN

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When to use it

When should I use MEDIAN instead of AVERAGE?

Use MEDIAN when a few extreme values would distort the mean. For skewed data like salaries, home prices, or response times, the median better reflects the typical value because outliers do not pull it.

How does MEDIAN handle an even count of numbers?

With an even count there is no single middle value, so MEDIAN returns the average of the two middle numbers after sorting.

Use cases

Typical salary unaffected by one outlier

Median of an even-count dataset

Used in

finance · operations · science

Syntax

MEDIAN(value1,...)

Examples

=MEDIAN({1,2,3,4,5}) // => 3
=MEDIAN({1,2,3,4}) // => 2.5
=MEDIAN({1,2,3,4,5},26,4) // => 4