Using QUARTILE in an Excel pivot table to summarise data by sub-populations

calendar_today Asked Nov 18, 2012
thumb_up 9 upvotes
history Updated April 16, 2026

Question posted 2012 · +8 upvotes

I’ve got a large table of data in an Excel spreadsheet that, essentially, can be considered to be a collection of values for individuals identified as belonging to various subpopulations:

  IndivID   SubPopID  Value
     1          A       33.56
     2          E       42.31
     3          D       16.35
     4          A       50.59
     5          F       80.63
     ...

There are over 10,000 individuals in this table, and over 50 subpopulations.

I would like to calculate the 5-number summary (Min, Q1, Median, Q3, Max) for each of the subpopulations.

Min and Max are easy in a pivot table. But Q1, Q2 (median), and Q3 don’t seem to be possible.

Question

Is there any way to calculate the quartiles for each subpopulation in a pivot table in Excel?

The answer should look like this:

SubPopID      Min     Q1     Q2        Q3      Max
   A         3.23    12.06   20.35   28.29     50.59
   B 
   C
   ...

Accepted answer +9 upvotes

My experience is that you can’t do percentiles in a pivot table. I just did a web search and don’t see anything to contradict that. I think the best you can do is have your source data in a table so you can refer to it dynamically, and then use the percentile function in another table.

I’ve seen one article about using PowerPivot, but that’s only available in Excel 2010, and it looks hard. I have 2010, and when faced with a similar problem, I still opted to go the route I’m suggesting here.

EDIT: Explanation of my proposed alternative:

In answer to your question in the comments, here’s how I’d calculate percentiles from a table of data:

Table of percentiles

It relies on an single formula, which is the same for every cell from F2 to H6. It’s an array formula, meaning it’s entered with Ctrl-Shift-Enter. It uses an IF statement to filter on the various possible SubPopIDs. Here’s the formula for F2:

=PERCENTILE(IF(Table1[SubPopID]=F$1,Table1[Value],""),$E2/100)

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