Statistics for Decision- Making in Business - Maricopa Community ...

2.3.4 Rank
What if, on the other hand, an employee wants to know what the rank of his salary is (he knows
his percentile value) This requires reverse-engineering of the idea of a percentile. Without the
use of any mathematical formulas, we would need to count the number of values that are equal to
or lesser than salary in question. To make this easier, we can use Excel‟s Rank() function. The
parameters we will use are as follows:
= rank(value, cell range, 1)
This will return the number of values that are less than or equal to the value in question. If we
changed the parameter of 1 to a 0, Excel would return the ranking of that value, treating rankings
as being similar to the ranks of, say, runners in a race.
We will then need to divide this output by the number of observations in the dataset. To make
the counting process more automated, we can take this output and divide it by the output of the
count() function. This function will simply count the number of entries in the specified range,
and has the following parameter:
= count(cell range)
Let‟s say the employee making $24,000 would like to know his salary‟s rank. To calculate, we
would type the following:
Giving us:
Statistics for Decision-Making in Business © Milos Podmanik Page 61