VARPA in WPS Spreadsheet: Population Variance Including Text and Booleans

=VARPA(value1, value2, ...)

The lesson describes 1 through 30 arguments. Original controls use one referenced range, so no current universal argument ceiling is inferred. They include numeric cells, actual Boolean cells and plain nonnumeric text. Numeric-looking text, directly supplied arguments, blank cells and error values are outside the controls.

Enter Boolean TRUE and FALSE as logical values, not as quoted strings. For reproducible setup, =TRUE() and =FALSE() express the intended logical cell types. A plain label such as note is the text example. Exact parsing or display formatting was not exercised in an application for this guide.

Enter the following typed contents in A2:A6:

Use =VARPA(A2:A6) in C2. The normalized values are 2, 4, 0, 1, 0. Their mean is 7/5 = 1.4, and their squared deviations total 11.2. Divide by all five included entries to obtain 2.24.

Do not calculate the checking mean by applying a function that ignores the text and Boolean cells in the original range. The mean must be calculated from the same normalized values used for variance.

For each row, enter the values in A2 downward and pass the complete range to VARPA. The first, second, third and sixth use A2:A6; the fourth uses A2:A5; the fifth uses A2:A4.

The second and third results agree because a referenced FALSE and a plain text label both normalize to zero in this documented scope. The final row changes a zero to one, changing both the mean and the squared deviations.

Including a text label as zero is a statistical modeling choice with consequences. If the label means “missing measurement,” treating it as a measured zero can distort the result. Clean and classify data according to its meaning before choosing a variance function.

The numeric-only 2, 4, 6 control gives 8/3 with population divisor three. A sample variance would use a different denominator. VARPA’s distinctive behavior here concerns inclusion and conversion, not a switch to sample variance.

The official walkthrough includes 15, 18, 20, two plain text labels, TRUE and FALSE. Normalizing them to 15, 18, 20, 0, 0, 1, 0 gives mean 54/7 and variance 76.2040816326531, matching the displayed 76.20408163.

The formula image is labeled VARP and its accompanying mean description mentions AVERAGE. The population squared-deviation formula remains coherent only when the mean and n refer to the included normalized values. The actual mixed-data walkthrough corroborates that interpretation; using a raw mean that ignores text would not reproduce it.

No exact blank, error-cell, numeric-text or scalar-argument coercion is asserted here. AVERAGE has its own inclusion rules, while DEVSQ describes squared deviations under a separate contract. Keep typed source data and the intended conversion policy visible when explaining a result.

The official WPS lesson is dated 2019-06-24 and explicitly labels WPS Office for Windows Personal. Its numeric build is unspecified. This documents the function by that date; it does not establish first introduction, the last functioning build, other-platform parity or a retirement/deprecation history.

The complete lesson and its formula images and walkthrough were inspected on October 18, 2026. Original examples are documentation-derived independent calculations, not WPS or other spreadsheet-engine executions. Numeric reference values do not certify application precision or statistical model suitability.