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In Excel, the average of a range can be calculated by using the AVERAGE function, which takes a range of cells as its argument. However, if the range includes negative numbers, these can skew the result. To avoid this, the AVERAGEIF function can be used, which calculates the average of the range, but only if the value is greater than zero. The syntax for this function is AVERAGEIF(range, “>0”).
You can use the following formula to calculate the average in Excel only for values that are greater than zero:
=AVERAGEIF(B2:B14, ">0", B2:B14)
This particular formula calculates the average value in the range B2:B14 only for the cells that have a value greater than zero.
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: Calculate Average if Greater than Zero in Excel
Suppose we have the following dataset in Excel that shows the total sales made by various employees at a company:
If we simply used the AVERAGE() formula, we would find the average sales for all of the employees:
The average sales per employee is 3.307.
However, suppose we wanted to only calculate the average for employees who had greater than zero sales.
We could type the following formula into cell D2:
=AVERAGEIF(B2:B14, ">0", B2:B14)
The following screenshot shows how to use this formula in practice:
The average sales for employees who had greater than zero sales was 4.3.
This formula calculated the average by only using the values that were greater than zero.
Average of Values Greater than Zero: (10+4+4+3+9+2+1+1+4+5) / 10 = 4.3.
This matches the value calculated by our formula.