Average from 5 cells if not blank or zero

Question

I need to calculate an average of 5 cells, but if a cell is blank or zero, it should neglect this value.

I am not able to get it to work with

=AVERAGEIFS(A10;B13;C5;D6;D8;"<>0")

Does anyone know the correct way to calculate this?

Answer 1

For an average of non-contiguous values, excluding any zeroes, try this formula

=IFERROR(SUM(A10;B13;C5;D6;D8)/((A10<>0)+(B13<>0)+(C5<>0)+(D6<>0)+(D8<>0));0)

or assuming no negative values you can use this

=IFERROR(SUM(A10;B13;C5;D6;D8)/INDEX(FREQUENCY((A10;B13;C5;D6;D8);0);2);0)

I used semi-colon delimiters as per question, change to commas if your regional settings demands

Answer 2

You are looking for "Averageif":

Specifically, you want to use the range that includes possible blanks and then for the criteria use ">0"

=AVERAGEIF(C1:C5,">0")

Update: Non-contiguous ranges (not all working)

In the comments for this answer is a discussion about localization. My locale is United States (Excel 2010), so my delimiter between values passed to a function is the comma ,

Performing an averageif function on non-contiguous ranges is possible:

=AVERAGEIF(B1:B1:B3:B3:B5:B5:B7:B7,">0")

For your locale, you might need to adjust delimiters, but the key thing is for the selection of individual cells, use the format "C1:C1:D4:D4" for the individual cells C1 and D4. The engine must be parsing the references as pairs.

Answer 3

I found myself working on something that I wanted to compute a formula only with the cells that are not empty. To accomplish this, I used the following:

=IF(COUNT(DATA),COMPUTE(DATA),"")

(where COMPUTE is the formula or computation you want to make, and DATA is the selection of data you have--in my case a column of data).

To make sure the cells are empty/zero/something when not a "normal value" you can use something like: =IF(CONDITION,NORMAL VALUE,"")

Example:

=IF(SUM(DATA)=0,"",SUM(DATA))

This will only sum the data if it is non-zero, and other cells will see this cell as blank when the data is zero.

Answer 4

Averageif using Indirect

After failing about three times with my other answer for this question, this answer should be ready for inspection:

=AVERAGEIF(INDIRECT({"b1","b3","b5","b7"}),">0")

Note: the localization of my Excel is United States Excel 2010. My delimiter is a comma, so adjust per your locale. If you would like to also average negative numbers, use "<>0" as the last value in the Averageif function.

How it works

The Indirect function makes a custom range of just the cells specified by (in this case) an array of strings. Averageif only adds items to its count if the criteria is met.