How to Sum a Column of Zeros in Excel. You can use the Sum function in Microsoft Office Excel to sum columns of data, whether your data is in an Excel table or is simply a range in a column of ...

SUM just piles everything together and bloats your numbers. If you’ve ever seen a total that’s way too high and wondered why, check for nested SUMs. SUBTOTAL doesn’t have that problem.

As an example, if you calculated the sum of a group of data values, you would divide that figure by the number of non-blank figures to calculate the average.