I think it was Deborah D. that answered this same question for me. If the
data contains blanks, is assumes that those are text, and does a count. If
it is all numbers, then it uses sum.

"MMesarch" wrote:

Hi,
When you drag an item from the field list into the pivot table, how does
EXCEL decide what field setting ( Count, Avg, Stdev) to use. Sometimes it
choses Sum and sometimes it choses Count, even in the the same pivot table.
I would like to set it to always use average or stdev as a default.
Thanks.

--
Mark Mesarch
School of Natural Resources
University of Nebraska-Lincoln