why don't you use conditional formatting?
1: risk-safe
2
3
4
5: riskiest

with conditional formatting you could then say, that each
cell with a 1 has a green background (if you want to
make the number invisible, select the same color for the
font!) and so on.

at the end you could then put the formula:
=ROUND(SUM(A1:A10)/COUNT(A1:A10);0)
with the same conditional formatting.

hope that helps

Greetings Carlo

"Patrick" wrote:

I want to put a color in a a column of cells from a drop down menu that pops
up when I click a cell to indicate risk-green for safe, blue, yellow orange
to red for riskiest. Then I want to average the column to give me a result
color. Anyone done something like that before?

thx ;=)