Consider the following table of data...
| Year | Tempurature (°F) |
|---|---|
| 2000 | 30.3 |
| 2001 | M |
| 2002 | 36.1 |
| 2003 | M |
Notice that half of the values are a single char, or string, such as M
The other half of the values are floats such as 36.1.
What excel formula will average all numeric values? That is, we want to exclude all of the letter Ms from our average.
The following formula is my starting point...
=AVERAGEIF(INDIRECT("Sheet1!B2:B"&ROWS(B:B)), "<> 0")| Spreadsheet lang | Plain English |
|---|---|
INDIRECT("Sheet1!B2:B"&ROWS(B:B)) | The entire B-column from sheet 1, except for the top row of column B (ignores column headers) |
<> 0 | not equal to zero |
We want to change the <> 0 ("not equal to zero") to somthing like "is a number".
Note that the string of text M is not a number.
Decimal numbers in floating point format (such as 36.12) are numbers.... or perhaps it is a numeric string.
What do we replace <> 0 with in order to make sure that the AVERAGEIF function skips over all non-numeric strings in the column being averaged?