MAXA 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.

MAXA returns the greatest included value after treating logical TRUE as one, FALSE as zero and referenced text as zero. Negative numbers remain negative numbers; the function does not compare absolute magnitudes. Versioned function help.

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

value1 and further arguments can be values or ranges. The types in the dataset are significant: H5 is stored text “8”, H6 is text “pending”, and H7 is genuinely empty.

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.

With N2:N4 containing −2,−4,−6, =MAXA(N2:N4) = −2. Adding a text label changes the result: the native advanced check =MAXA(N2:N4,H6) returns 0, because the referenced label contributes zero. A data-cleaning label can therefore hide the greatest actual negative measurement.

The mixed range H2:H6 has converted values 2,1,0,0,0 and a maximum of 2. For a numeric-only maximum, first choose an appropriate numeric-only function or validate the data types rather than assuming the A-suffix means errors are ignored.

A maximum can be combined across groups without weighting: max(max(A),max(B))=max(A∪B), provided the same conversion rules apply. For the numeric group F2:F4 and the mixed group H2:H6, the individual maxima are 6 and 2; their joint maximum is 6.

The empty case is a special implementation convention: MAXA with no contributing values returns zero. Do not use that zero alone as evidence that an observation was present. In contrast, a nonempty group containing only −2,−4,−6 returns −2; the routine does not automatically seed every nonempty maximum with 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.

Referenced errors propagate. The table’s MAXA(1/0,2) therefore returns #DIV/0!, rather than two or zero. Empty cells are ignored, while text cells contribute zero. Direct text has a separate version-sensitive rule explained below; the native 1.12.57 table deliberately preserves its older results.

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
• Current empty-set helper

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.

MAX, MIN, ABS.