I then typed the following formula into G5 (which I then copied down to G6:G11)… To create the median values in column G, I typed the word “Median” in G4 and formatted G4 with the same font, colour and cell background as F4. As you can see from the values in F1 and F2, the overall average and the overall median are different. The screenshot below contains fictitious response times in minutes for police officers responding to calls over a 7-day period. You have to create a formula manually and copy it down. In fact you can’t actually display the median in a pivot table.

It’s not as simple as clicking the drop down arrow in the Values section, selecting Value Field Settings and selecting “Median” as median does not exist as an option… This isn’t the place for a detailed discussion about average v median (I’m not a mathematician and you’re probably not interested) but in a nutshell, the average is the sum of a set of numbers divided by the number of numbers whereas the median is the middle point of a set of numbers, in which the numbers are placed in ascending order and half the numbers are above the median and half are below. I was then asked “how can you display the median?”. Last week, during an Excel training course that I was delivering, I demonstrated how to display the average in a pivot table.

How to make pivot table in mac numbers