Excel exists to take care of mundane calculations and ease your burden.

Average is a term generally defined as the arithmetic mean.

But then again, why bother when you’re free to use Excel?

Series of grades in an Excel spreadsheet

So, the average for1,2,3, and4would be (1+2+3+4) divided by 4, which results in2.5.

There are numerous ways you could do this, from usingthe SUM functionandthe COUNT functionto manually inputting the calculations.

As the name suggests, this function calculates the average for numbers.

Using the AVERAGE function in Excel

The values you input can be numbers, cells, or ranges.

AVERAGE is a mathematical function, and it doesn’t work with text.

If your range has text cells in it, AVERAGE will ignore them.

AVERAGE is a straightforward function that calculates exactly what it says.

In this example, we’ve got the grades of a Chemistry class.

The goal is to calculate the average grade to find out how the class has performed.

Since the grades are in that range, the formula will display the average grade.

It seems that the students have done a good job!

Note that the AVERAGE function calculates the unweighted average for a series.

That means that it assumes all entries have the same weight.

You cancalculate the weighted average in Excelthrough other methods.

The most convenient one is using the AVERAGE function.

This function simply takes in the numbers and returns their average.