[lifeisstillgood]

Well that's just inconsistent and annoying and wrong.

I think the original comments are still over the top, as it seems to be arguin that a defined convention exists but the OP disagreed with it.

However if your example is what they were actually complaining about then hell yes.

[endersshadow]

Within Excel, ranges ignore blank cells in computation, but a reference to a blank cell returns 0. The idea being that if you specify a cell in a computation, you're expecting something to be there, whereas when you have a range, you may have sparse data throughout that range, and therefore, the result shouldn't break.

SQL behaves similarly. See: http://www.sqlfiddle.com/#!15/37025/5