The AVERAGE function is a statistical function which returns the average of the numerical values in the identified range, if presented with non-numeric values it will ignore those values in its calculations.

This is the format of the AVERAGE function:

= AVERAGE( Range 1, Range 2, Range 3, etc…)

Here is an example of the AVERAGE function:

= AVERAGE( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) = 3

= AVERAGE( 3, 4, 8) = 5

This function is useful to calculate things like average sales, held inventory, or cost of a recurring expense across a period of time.

An example of a functional implementation of this would be if you are a car rental service and trying to calculate the average amount of gas you put every time you go fill up a tank of a returned rental vehicle.

= AVERAGE( 45.30, 22.63, 19.48, 37.90, 15.78, 33.69) = 29.13