Statistical Functions
Beginner
MAX Function (Statistical)
The worst case, which is usually what the complaint is about.
Task:
Your service level agreement is written around the longest anyone waits, not the average. Put the longest of these five call waits in B7.
Learning Objectives:
- Find the largest value in a range
- Use a maximum as a worst-case measure
- Bound a dataset with MIN and MAX together
Hints
Solve without hints for +5 XP
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Call | Wait (seconds) |
| 2 | C-101 | 42 |
| 3 | C-102 | 187 |
| 4 | C-103 | 65 |
| 5 | C-104 | 310 |
| 6 | C-105 | 98 |
| 7 | Longest wait |
What this exercise teaches (contains the answer)
Three of these five callers were answered inside two minutes and one waited more than five. The average is a shade over 140 seconds, which describes nobody's experience especially well and certainly not the experience of whoever complained. MIN and MAX together are the cheapest honesty check there is: they tell you how wide the range you are summarising really is.