Three kinds of average, side by side
Paste a list of numbers and get the mean, median, mode, range and sum at once. Shows why the three averages often disagree.
'Average' means three different things and choosing badly can misrepresent your data entirely. The mean gets dragged by extremes; the median ignores them; the mode only cares what repeats.
Salaries are the classic case. A handful of very high earners pull the mean well above what most people take home, which is why income statistics quote the median.
Mean, median and mode from the same list Minimum, maximum, sum and count Immediate visibility of skew when the mean and median diverge Values may be separated by commas, spaces or line breaks. When no value repeats, there is no mode, and the tool says so rather than inventing one. When should I use the median instead of the mean? Whenever outliers are present or the data is skewed — incomes, house prices, response times. One extreme value can move a mean and barely touch a median.
Can a dataset have more than one mode? Yes. If two values tie for most frequent, both are modes and the set is bimodal.
What is the range good for? A quick sense of spread, though it only reflects the two most extreme values. Standard deviation describes the middle far better.
Does the order of my numbers matter? Not for the result. The tool sorts internally to find the median, so paste them in any order.
Worked example Where mean and median part ways
Input: 1, 2, 2, 3, 4
Output: Mean 2.4 · Median 2 · Mode 2
Note: Add a single 100 to that list and the mean jumps to 18.7 while the median only moves to 2.5. That gap is the whole reason both exist.
