Excel averageifs with or function

Question

I am using the averageifs function, and have one column where I need to calculate the average if either of the criteria are true.

I have tried using the OR function, and tried the curly brackets, but both give me errors.

=AVERAGEIFS(N1:N612,I1:I612,{"FL","IF"})

There are more ranges, but the coding for those is fine.

To be clear, I want to return an average if column "I" contains (specifically) the letters FL, OR the letters IF. Any other letters should mean that entry is not averaged.

TIA!

Answer 1

AVERAGEIFS extra criteria is a boolean AND operator, it can't perform OR operations. But since your columns do not change we can somewhat implement this ourselves:

Here is a simple way using an array formula (entered with ctrl + shift + enter):

=AVERAGE(IF((I1:I612="IF")+(I1:I612="FL"),N1:N612))

Or if you don't like using array formulas you basically do this manually using SUMPRODUCT and COUNTIF:

=SUMPRODUCT((I1:I612="IF")*(N1:N612)+(I1:I612="FL")*(N1:N612))/(COUNTIF(I1:I612,"IF")+COUNTIF(I1:I612,"FL"))

Answer 2

Chancea has given some good techniques I will list one more that avoids array formulas as many will find it easier to read avoiding the sumproduct.

=(SUMIF(I1:I612,"FL",N1:N612)+SUMIF(I1:I612,"IF",N1:N612))/(COUNTIF(I1:I612,"FL")+COUNTIF(I1:I612,"IF"))