Median Gift

I do all of this kind of work in Excel, or R if I'm also trying to do statistical models on my data. But it's very easy to find a median gift (or mode, or average) in Excel. 



In case you're a little new to this (or in case someone else who reads this later is new to this), follow these general steps:

1.) Create a query that groups together the contituents you want to study.

2.) Pipe that query into an export.

3.) In the export, zero in on the types of gifts you want information on. You can limit by appea, campaign, fund, gift date, gift type, or any combination of these things.

4.) Export the gift amounts into some kind of Excel combatible format (I pretty much always use .csv for my exports and convert them into other types later if I need to)

5.) In Excel, click on a cell that's not in your gift amount column and type in '=Median(gift_amount_column)' where 'gift_amont_column' is whatever column the gifts are in. So for example, '=Median(A:A)' 



Obviously don't use any types of quotation marks when entering in your forumla.



Really, the trickiest part is making sure you're exporting the right gifts. After that, the Excel work is dead simple.