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Exercise log: how to calculate average miles per week?

I have been keeping an exercise log of daily walks or bike rides. I'd like to be able to calculate the average miles per week of each. My rows are the date, and columns are separate for walking and biking, and I enter the total miles each day in the respecitve column.

Since it's random as far as to whether I walk or bike on a given day, I can't just get the average and multiply by 7 (which seems like the wrong way to do things anyways).

I've looked at the funtion reference, and thought perhaps Duration might be the key but I couldn't figure it out from the help.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Jul 19, 2012 9:15 AM

16 replies

Jul 21, 2012 1:38 PM in response to George Coghill

George Coghill wrote:

Jerry,

Much appreciated, this did the trick! If I understand correctly, you created a new table with a weekly date interval (Sundays), and then told the AVERAGEIFS function to check the date ranges in the log table to see if they are between the specified weekly (Sunday) dates in the new chart—correct?

What does the ampersand symbol accomplish? I'm just trying to understand what you did as opposed to just using the file you edited. I'd like to know what's going on here 🙂

Thanks again!

George,

Glad you liked that approach. The pieces fell into place surprisingly easily.

The ampersand is the concatenation operator. It stitches together two strings. If one element is a cell reference, it interprets the content of the cell as a string. in the condition parameter in AVERAGEIFS it is common to combine the relationship symbol, < or = or >, with a cell reference by concatenation.

Use the descriptions and examples in the Function Browser and the iWork Formulas and Functions User Guide as a study guide.

Jerry

Exercise log: how to calculate average miles per week?