View Single Post
  #2   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions
Jerry W. Lewis Jerry W. Lewis is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 837
Default I need to calculate a Geometric mean

How do you want negative numbers handled? The geometric mean is not usually
defined with negative numers, because the nth root of a negative number
(product including an odd number of negatives) is a complex number (involving
the imaginary number i=SQRT(-1)).

Jerry

"Biff" wrote:

I need to calculate a geometric mean for an array of numbers of which some
are negative. The geomean function in Excel does not calculate if there are
negative numbers in the array. I'm not sure what the purprose of the
function is if you can't include negative return numbers, but that is the
fact. Does anyone know how a work around or another way to calculate the
geometric mean with an array of negative numbers included?