Looking to calculate the absolute average deviation from the mean for a given cell. I have a formula that takes the absolute value difference between the reference cell's value and the average value of the range in which it falls. not sure if there's an actual excel function that performs this or is this my best way to go?

=ABS(A4-AVERAGE($A$4:$A$13))

I don't think there is a function for this. Your formula will give the absolute deviation from the mean for each sample. If you really need the absolute average deviation from the mean, you will need to get the average for the result of each value in your sample. That is, if these calculations are in B4:B13, you would need to average these.



Aside: Similarly, AFAIK there is no function to find the range of a sample though it's a common statistic. However, it's easily done with MIN and MAX.