In this post, I’ll show you how to get the average of a range of grades in Excel after dropping the two lowest grades. Here’s the example formula: =(SUM(A1:A6)-SMALL(A1:A6,1)-SMALL(A1:A6,2))/(COUNT(A1:A6)-2).

What this formula does is sum up the values in the range of cells A1 to A6. Then it subtracts the first smallest value (small(a1:a6,1)) and the second smallest value (small(a1:a6,2)) from that sum. Then it divides the result of that calculation by the count of values in the range after subtracting two (for the two lowest values).

One advantage of using this particular formula is that the COUNT function won’t count text. So if you have a range of cells like 100, 75, 92, excused, 95, COUNT will return the value of 4.

I hope the illustration helps some. If not, playing around in Excel likely will.