Calculations on a Filtered List in Excel

But what if you want to find out the total or average of your filtered data? Unfortunately the SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, COUNTA etc functions seem to let us down here.

Here’s my unfiltered data and the SUM function in action:

And here’s my filtered data:

Notice anything different? No? Exactly! We may want the SUM function to only sum the visible data but, as it was designed to do, it will sum ALL of the data, even the hidden rows.

So what’s the answer? The SUBTOTAL function!

The subtotal function can, if we ask it nicely, ignore any values hidden by the autofilter. It looks like this:

=SUBTOTAL(function_num,ref1,[ref2], . . . . ])

The function_num argument tells the subtotal function what sort of calculation you want it to do:

1 AVERAGE
2 COUNT
3 COUNTA
4 MAX
5 MIN
6 PRODUCT
7 STDEV
8 STDEVP
9 SUM
10 VAR
11 VARP

So here’s the same example as above using the subtotal function:

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