I have rows of numbers from which I would like to extract the five lowest
values from each row, compute the average and display the answer in a
different column. How can I do this?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Enter this in a column in row 1 to give average of lowest five numbers
(colums A to I in my example) and copy down as required. Then average this
column for overall average if required.

=AVERAGE(SMALL($A1:$I1,{1,2,3,4,5}))

HTH

"maestro" wrote:

I have rows of numbers from which I would like to extract the five lowest
values from each row, compute the average and display the answer in a
different column. How can I do this?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Great answer - just what I needed. Thx so much, Toppers!

"Toppers" wrote:


Enter this in a column in row 1 to give average of lowest five numbers
(colums A to I in my example) and copy down as required. Then average this
column for overall average if required.

=AVERAGE(SMALL($A1:$I1,{1,2,3,4,5}))

HTH

"maestro" wrote:

I have rows of numbers from which I would like to extract the five lowest
values from each row, compute the average and display the answer in a
different column. How can I do this?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

On Sat, 9 Sep 2006 10:46:01 -0700, Toppers
wrote:

=AVERAGE(SMALL($A1:$I1,{1,2,3,4,5}))

That is an absolutely elegant solution to the original question.

What I think I understand is that the "SMALL" function is passing the
five smallest values in the array to the "AVERAGE" function.

My question is how does one learn about this capability fo the SMALL
function to pass multiple arguments? When I look at the help file for
the SMALL function it gives the syntax:

SMALL(array,k)

and none of the examples demonstrate more than one value for k.

Is there some generic comment in the help files that explains what "k"
can be?

John Keith