AVERAGEA Function (Gnumeric)

• Introduced: Gnumeric 0.27 release notes explicitly record its addition.
• Supported in: Gnumeric 1.12.62; no retirement is established.
• Scope: Desktop Gnumeric with its Statistics plugin. English comma-separated formulas are shown.
• Checked: October 14, 2026. The tables and named advanced check use 1.12.57 ssconvert. Current 1.12.62 source was inspected; that release was not executed.

AVERAGEA computes an arithmetic mean after including logical values as TRUE=1 and FALSE=0. Referenced text contributes zero and still increases the count; genuinely empty cells are ignored. This can be useful for deliberately encoded data, but it is often wrong for a measurement column containing status labels. Versioned function help.

=AVERAGEA(value1[,value2,...])

value1 and further values may be scalars or ranges. The examples below use the explicitly typed dataset. A text value and an empty cell are different, even when a formula or display makes them look similar.

Brackets denote optional additional arguments; do not type them. Current implementation.

Enter F2:F4 as numbers 2,4,6 and N2:N4 as numbers −2,−4,−6. Enter the mixed column exactly as follows:

F5 is also genuinely empty. Prefix an entered numeric-looking text value with an apostrophe if needed; the apostrophe is an entry marker, not part of the stored value.

The mixed cells H2:H6 contain number 2, logical TRUE, logical FALSE, text “8” and text “pending”. They contribute 2,1,0,0,0, so =AVERAGEA(H2:H6) = 0.6. Replacing the pending label with a genuinely empty cell would remove that zero from the denominator; it is not the same operation as replacing it with an empty string.

For measurements, decide whether text means a deliberate zero, an excluded observation or a data-quality problem before choosing this function. Numeric text in a referenced cell is still text here. Simply formatting it as a number does not change the stored type.

For F2:F4=2,4,6 and H2:H6 as above, =AVERAGEA(F2:F4,H2:H6) = 1.875, because the converted sum is 12+3=15 over 3+5=8 values. Averaging the two group means would instead give (4+0.6)/2=2.3 and would weight the unequal groups incorrectly.

The native advanced check repeats the mixed-range mean, while the weighting calculation is an independent reconstruction. All-blank input has no denominator and gives #DIV/0!; a real zero observation alone returns zero.

The older callback includes all strings as zero. The current callback adds COLLECT_STRINGS_DIRECT_COMBO2; the current collector tries to parse direct strings as numbers and reports #VALUE! when parsing fails. Referenced strings still follow the zero-string rule.

No exact first release for this conversion change is asserted. These are English numeric-string examples, not tests of other locales or date-like strings.

The native boundary table uses 1.12.57: direct text “8”, “abc” and "" all contribute zero in that version. The current-source section above explains a later direct-argument rule; do not transplant these direct-text results into a newer release. Errors in the input are propagated, rather than ignored or converted to zero.

F5 is an actually empty cell. Errors below are the tested build’s results, not zero-valued mathematical answers.

• Current worksheet implementation
• Tested-version worksheet implementation

The retained workbook’s stale SUM cache and uncached SUM both recalculated correctly. Formula identities, typed inputs and native results were inspected. The importer reported unsupported style-extension elements; that warning is retained, and no all-formatting claim is made. GUI entry, other locales and later-release output were not tested.

AVERAGE, COUNT, COUNTA.