Quartile function

Returns the quartile of a data set. Quartiles often are used in sales and survey data to divide populations into groups. For example, you can use QUARTILE to find the top 25 percent of incomes in a population.

Important: This function has been replaced with one or more new functions that may provide improved accuracy and whose names better reflect their usage. Although this function is still available for backward compatibility, you should consider using the new functions from now on, because this function may not be available in future versions of Excel.

For more information about the new functions, see QUARTILE.EXC function and QUARTILE.INC function.

Syntax

QUARTILE(array,quart)

The QUARTILE function syntax has the following arguments:

• Array     Required. The array or cell range of numeric values for which you want the quartile value.

• Quart     Required. Indicates which value to return.

If quart equals	QUARTILE returns
0	Minimum value
1	First quartile (25th percentile)
2	Median value (50th percentile)
3	Third quartile (75th percentile)
4	Maximum value

Remarks

• If array is empty, QUARTILE returns the #NUM! error value.

• If quart is not an integer, it is truncated.

• If quart < 0 or if quart > 4, QUARTILE returns the #NUM! error value.

• MIN, MEDIAN, and MAX return the same value as QUARTILE when quart is equal to 0 (zero), 2, and 4, respectively.

Example

Copy the example data in the following table, and paste it in cell A1 of a new Excel worksheet. For formulas to show results, select them, press F2, and then press Enter. If you need to, you can adjust the column widths to see all the data.

Data
1
2
4
7
8
9
10
12
Formula	Description (Result)	R esult
=QUARTILE(A2:A9,1)	First quartile (25th percentile) of the data above (3.5)	3.5