Forum Discussion
What is this Madness? Weird Average and Sum results
What is this devil math? What am I missing? The darker green value and blue value should match. I checked for truncated decimal values, even rebuilt the sample to ensure nothing was weird about the original cells. This is not an insignificant difference for what I'm doing, and I don't understand why these aren't lining up. I'm sorry if I'm missing something simple, but please, help!
1 Reply
There is no madness or devil math here, just a (common) misconception: "The darker green value and blue value should match."
No, they should not match. The average in the darker blue is an unweighted average of the percentages above. It would be meaningful only if each row of data had the same importance. The average in the darker green is the weighted average; it gives more weight to the larger values. The latter is almost certainly the one you want to use.
