The column includes over 1,300 wholesale costs of product (in currency). We need to find the total, as well as the average of those costs.
Of course no one bothered to answer this question, it is too simple and too basic, only idiots like 73-year-old women trying to keep off welfare by working would ask a question like this.
Well, there are a lot of non-computer people who would use MS Office if we could afford it, but we can’t so we found this, and find things work differently with no easily found instructions on how to do simple tasks. Plus the computer geeks who answer the questions find our questions too stupid to bother with, and are either insulting or ignore the questions totally.
Just a hint: If you only find a very old but unanswered question concerning your matter, you needn’t shy back from asking a new question. Not answering the old one was an accident, not malevolence. Nobody commented this question in an insulting way. (As everywhere you are better welcome here if not whining. By the way: I’m 74.)
(It would be exactly the same in Excel. An entire column has 1 048 576 rows/cells. We can sum over a whole column nonetheless because Calc cares for efficieny insofar.)
If the column is A and if it’s assured that there are no numbers in A that should be excluded: =SUM(A:A) (Very old versions of LibO don’t support the “whole column notation”. The column then is represented by A1:A1048576.)
If in A1 there is a heading and the sum should be restricted to a range of 2000 rows e.g. you may use =SUM(A2:A2001).
If interested in the average use =AVERAGE() instead of =SUM(). Both these functions ignore cells containing text completely.
I don’t often find insulting posts. However, people are people everywhere, and we should love the harsh ones, too. And contributors to forums like this one are volunteers spending their time to help others. Most of the developers also are volunteers.