From the archive
Day 39
Friday, 11 September 2026
Report a call center's hold times without one outlier setting the headline number
LARGE and SMALL pick the nth-ranked value straight out of a range, and paired with SUM, MAX, MIN and COUNT they build a trimmed average without deleting a single row.
Task:
You supervise the afternoon shift at a customer support call center. Seven calls came through today, each logged with its hold time in minutes. For the shift report, work out the second-longest hold time in B9 and the second-shortest hold time in B10 — so a single freak call never gets quoted as "the" longest or shortest wait. Then in B11 work out the average hold time with that one longest and one shortest call set aside, so an unusually bad or unusually lucky connection doesn't skew the number you report up the chain.
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Recent days
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