Basic Functions: SUM, AVERAGE
First time spreadsheet users tend to encounter these functions first - as they are the most frequently used and the easiest to understand. Updated.
Let us look at an example featuring SUM first.
Here - we have six sales regions - and in order to detmine the total sales for each year across all regions, we use the SUM function as is illustrated below.
It should be pointed out that the range of cells to which the SUM function is applied need not necessarily be a single column or row.
OOo Calc offers an alternate way of SUMming a range of numbers. There is a SUM icon in the formula bar (below)
First, select a cell, then the SUM icon. If the selected cell is at the bottom of a column of cells, OOo Calc will make an intelligent guess of the range - which you just have to accept or override.
As an illustration of the AVERAGE function, consider 12 months of temperature data from 3 cities. The average for the full year is easily obtained for each city - as is shown below in the example.
There is also the AVERAGEA function - exactly the same as AVERAGE with the only difference being that the value of a text cell is considered to be 0. The AVERAGE function ignores text cells.