Find the Average of Closest 2 Numbers out of 3 [formula challenge]

Share

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

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?

Calculating Average of closest 2 numbers using ExcelWhat 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.

More Formula Challenges:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Share this tip with your colleagues

Excel and Power BI tips - Chandoo.org Newsletter

Get FREE Excel + Power BI Tips

Simple, fun and useful emails, once per week.

Learn & be awesome.

Welcome to Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for visiting. My aim is to make you awesome in Excel & Power BI. I do this by sharing videos, tips, examples and downloads on this website. There are more than 1,000 pages with all things Excel, Power BI, Dashboards & VBA here. Go ahead and spend few minutes to be AWESOME.

Read my storyFREE Excel tips book

Overall I learned a lot and I thought you did a great job of explaining how to do things. This will definitely elevate my reporting in the future.
Rebekah S
Reporting Analyst
Excel formula list - 100+ examples and howto guide for you

From simple to complex, there is a formula for every occasion. Check out the list now.

Calendars, invoices, trackers and much more. All free, fun and fantastic.

Advanced Pivot Table tricks

Power Query, Data model, DAX, Filters, Slicers, Conditional formats and beautiful charts. It's all here.

Still on fence about Power BI? In this getting started guide, learn what is Power BI, how to get it and how to create your first report from scratch.

5 Responses to “Preparing Profit / Loss Pivot Reports [Part 2 of 6]”

  1. maury sway says:

    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?

  2. anne says:

    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
     

Leave a Reply