Average, Averagea, & True

If you were to take the average of a range of cells in which one or more of the cells contained non-numerical data, Excel would automatically calculate the average just the numerical entries.  However, if you were to use the function averagea in place of the standard average function, you would find a great difference in the result.  When you use the averagea function, the values of all of the cells, including the cells that contain non-numerical data will be used to calculate the average.  The cells containing text are treated as zeros.  Thus, a zero is used to calculate averagea.

Another function, the true function, can also be used in conjunction with the average function.  If you set a certain value equal to TRUE, when the average function is run, the TRUE values will be considered to be zeros, and the average and averagea functions will be figured accordingly.