Today I am asking you a tricky formula question. This is asked by Ionel on the Introduction to VLOOKUP, OFFSET & MATCH Formulas post.
The question is,
I have data in three columns: A,B,C and I want to get the average of the closest two values out of three in each row. Could you help me with a formula for this?
Now, how would you go about it?
What does closest of two mean?
We can assume that close-ness is nothing but distance between 2 numbers on numeric scale. So 3 is closer to 2 and 4 compared to 1 or 5.
Your challenge:
Assuming your data is in A2:C10, what formula will you write in D2:D10 to solve this?
Go ahead and get some coffee and get thinking.
Want to cop-out?
I have posted one solution in the next comment. You can see how I went about solving it.













5 Responses to “Preparing Profit / Loss Pivot Reports [Part 2 of 6]”
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I am not getting sound from the videos. I have checked all the settings and spent several hours searching the Internet to no avail.
Has anyone else had this problem?
Is there anyway to get the Grand Total to be broken out in the same fashion as the items above it? For instance, if you have in column 1, widget a, widget b, and have their sales by month in column 2, I'd like to see the grand total also be by month, for widget a & b combined.
I can't get anything other than a single line for the grand total, rather than the same format as the data above.
Widget A Month Sales
Jan 100
Feb 200
Widget B
Jan 150
Feb 250
Grand total - here I would also like to have Jan, Feb.
Jan 250
Feb 450