Tableau - Finding the Median

To find the median for a measure in tableau, right click on the measure and select median:

Note: The median is also known as the 50th percentile in statistics. This means half the observations fall below this value and half the observations are above this value.

Example:

Lets take a set of observations with the values: {1,2,5,10,1000}. What is the median value?

We can see the median value is the middle value in the ordered set. So in this case 5.

Example

Lets take a set of observations with the values: {1,2,5,10,11,1000}. What is the median value?

In this case he median or middle value is between 5 and 10.So we take the average of these two numbers to get 7.5

The distribution of numbers in this set is skewed right. This means that there is one or more very high values relative to the set. (In this case 1000). Because this set of numbers is right skewed it makes sense to look at the median to summarize the center point of the data values.