SIMnet Excel Practice Test

The function that calculates the average of a range of numbers in Excel is AVERAGE(). This function takes a set of numeric values, either from individual cells or a range, and computes their mean value. This is particularly useful for analyzing data, as it allows users to quickly determine the central tendency of a dataset without manually summing the values and dividing by the count of those values.

While the SUM() function adds up all the numbers in the specified range, it does not provide an average. The COUNT() function, on the other hand, counts the number of cells that contain numeric values within a range but does not calculate an average. MEAN() is a term often used in statistics to refer to the average, but it is not an actual function within Excel. Therefore, AVERAGE() is the only correct choice for calculating the average of a group of numbers.