Excel MAXA Function

The Excel MAXA function returns the largest numeric value in a range of values. The MAXA function ignores empty cells, but evaluates the logical values TRUE and FALSE as 1 and 0, respectively.
- value1 - Number, reference to numeric value, or range that contains numeric values.
- value2 - [optional] Number, reference to numeric value, or range that contains numeric values.
Like the MAX function, the MAXA function returns the largest numeric value in a supplied set of data. For example, the MAXA function can return the highest test score, the slowest time in a race, the maximum temperature, or the top sales number. Arguments can be provided as constants, or as references:
The primary difference between MAX and MAXA is that MAXA evaluates TRUE and FALSE values as 1 and 0 respectively. Microsoft documentation also suggests that MAXA evaluates numbers entered as text differently from MAX:
If you want to include logical values and text representations of numbers in a reference as part of the calculation, use the MAXA function.
This is a bit confusing. In my testing, MAX and MAXA both evaluate text representations of numbers when supplied directly as arguments. For example:
The difference appears to be that when cell references include text, MAXA evaluates them as zero in the calculation, whereas MAX simply ignores them. For example, if A1 contains -5, and A2 contains "10" (as a text value):
Further, MAXA appears to evaluate any text value in a cell reference as zero (i.e. "apple" would also evaluate as zero).
Notes
- The MAXA function ignores empty cells.
- The MAXA function accepts up to 255 arguments.
- If arguments contain no numbers, MAXA returns 0.
- Arguments can be provided as numbers, names, arrays, references, logical values, or numbers as text.
- MAXA function evaluates TRUE and FALSE values as 1 and 0 respectively.
- In a cell reference, a "number as text" is evaluated (and included) as zero.
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