How to find the mean, median and mode
- Type or paste your values into Numbers, separated by commas, spaces or new lines. A column copied from a spreadsheet works, and the line under the result shows how the list was read.
- Read the mean, median, mode, sum, count, smallest and largest values, range and both standard deviations.
- Click any value to copy it.
When the median tells you more
The mean uses every value, so one extreme number can pull it a long way. Take six results: 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 and 250. The mean is 83.33, which describes none of them. The median is 50.5, right in the middle of the typical values.
That’s why house prices and incomes are often reported as medians: a few very large values would push the mean far above what most people see. If the mean and median in your results are far apart, look for outliers or a lopsided distribution before relying on the mean.
Mode and standard deviation
A list can have more than one mode. In 2, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7 both 4 and 5 appear twice, so both are shown. If no value repeats, there is no mode.
Standard deviation measures how spread out the numbers are around the mean. A small value means most numbers sit close to the average, a large one means they are scattered. For 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7 and 9 the mean is 5 and the population standard deviation is exactly 2. The sample standard deviation of the same list is 2.14, a bit larger because it divides by 7 instead of 8.