Quick spreadsheet question

Cianos

Hope this is the right place for this. I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to do this on a spread sheet. Basically I want to determine the average from an ongoing sample of numbers.

Because the sample will be ongoing it wouldn't be practical to have to input the new number, then +1 the division variable, so I was hoping there's an easy way around this.

Just to make sure I'm describing it clear enough, as an example;

value 1: 8
value 2: 5
value 3: 16
value 4: 12

The average of these is 10.25. When I am inputting value 5, I will also have to divide the sum by 5...so I'm hoping there's an easy way to avoid having to do that each time.

Any help appreciated!

c-note

i've just tried this in excel

say you have 4 cells in a column a1 to a4

5
10
5
10

then in some other cell the formula =average(a1:a4) to display the average (7.5)

if you increase the range on the average function, eg, =average(a1:a10)
then the non entries do not affect the average

eg

5
10
#blank
#blank
#blank
5
#blank
#blank
10

will still give an average of 7.5

could you just increase the range of cells (say to 100), and if this fills up just increase the range again

Cianos

Good idea c-note, thanks for that