Obtaining the average or mean from an entire column

["Michael Johnson" <colloquial collision gmail com>]

Hello, I'm a new Gnumeric user and am having trouble with functions.

I would like to get an average of an entire column into a seperate
cell. The problem is that over the next few months (or years) this
column will be regularly updated. So I was thinking I could use a
function to count the entire number of cells in this column and then
using that number specify the location of the last cell.

I could then inform Gnumeric to start at a particular cell and then go
from that cell to the final specified cell and use the data to get an
average of the entire column.

Is there any function that will have Gnumeric look at a column and
return the number of cells in the range? And could I then use that
number to dynamically specify the final column to use in the average?

Thank you for you help and time.

--
M Johnson