Clarification
Christopher Breslin, a CPA in Louisville, Ky., spotted an important caveat that we neglected to mention in a recent “Better Idea” item (“Technology Q&A,” JofA, Nov. 2010, page 70), which suggested ways of averaging noncontiguous cells in Excel that contain some zero values. The two methods suggested would average all positive values in the specified range, but would ignore negatives (and zeroes). To include negative numbers in the average, change the criterion in either method from “>0” to “<>0″.
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