[excel] Help needed with Median If in Excel

I need to return a median of only a certain category on a spread sheet. Example Below

Airline    5
Auto       20
Auto       3
Bike       12
Airline    12
Airline    39

ect.

How can I write a formula to only return a median value of the Airline Categories. Similar to Average if, only for median. I cannot re-arrange the values. Thank you!

one solution could be to find a way of pulling the numbers from the string and placing them in a column of just numbers the using the =MEDIAN() function giving the new number column as the range

Assuming your categories are in cells A1:A6 and the corresponding values are in B1:B6, you might try typing the formula =MEDIAN(IF($A$1:$A$6="Airline",$B$1:$B$6,"")) in another cell and then pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER.

Using CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER tells Excel to treat the formula as an "array formula". In this example, that means that the IF statement returns an array of 6 values (one of each of the cells in the range $A$1:$A$6) instead of a single value. The MEDIAN function then returns the median of these values. See http://www.cpearson.com/excel/arrayformulas.aspx for a similar example using AVERAGE instead of MEDIAN.

Make a third column that has values like:

=IF(A1="Airline",B1)

=IF(A2="Airline",B2) etc

Then just perform a median on the new column.

Expanding on Brian Camire's Answer:

Using =MEDIAN(IF($A$1:$A$6="Airline",$B$1:$B$6,"")) with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER will include blank cells in the calculation. Blank cells will be evaluated as 0 which results in a lower median value. The same is true if using the average funtion. If you don't want to include blank cells in the calculation, use a nested if statement like so:

=MEDIAN(IF($A$1:$A$6="Airline",IF($B$1:$B$6<>"",$B$1:$B$6)))

Don't forget to press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to treat the formula as an "array formula".