 Show When using Google Sheets, there may be times where you have cells with no data. In these cases, you may want to count the number of cells that are not blank. This is possible by using Google Sheet COUNT functions! COUNTA is a function for counting cells that are not empty. Sometimes, however, the COUNTA function doesn't catch hidden special characters, so we can use SUMPRODUCT or COUNTIF to resolve this issue. If you do not know how to use these functions, this tutorial is for you. COUNTA MethodIn Google Sheets, the COUNTA function counts all the number of cells within a range that have values or a text string in it. It ignores cells that are empty while completing the count. As an example, here is data that has blank cells within a range: To count the number of cells that are not blank, just follow these steps.
SUMPRODUCT MethodCOUNTA function is very useful in counting cells that are blank or have no data in it. However, there may be times that COUNTA counts cells that seem empty. This is because, technically, those cells are not blank but just have a white space appearing on it. It happens, for instance, when you use conditional formatting that makes it appear as blank or sneaking a function =”” in it! To avoid this from happening, use SUMPRODUCT instead by following these steps:
COUNTIF MethodIf you have read the previous tutorials, Google Sheets hide some special characters from
view because of their special functions: this include the apostrophe, that it uses to indicate that the number characters should be interpreted as a string (we used this to input phone numbers to Google Sheets). To solve this, we will learn how to use COUNTIF to count cells that are not blank and do not have special characters hidden. As an example, let us look at this table: How many cells have entries in the table? There are nine (9) entries in that table. However, if you apply COUNTA function to count the entries, the result would be thirteen (13): The reason is that there are stray apostrophes and spaces in that table, and COUNTA counted them in. To exclude them from the count, we apply the COUNTIF
function with a special attribute: =COUNTIF(B3:E7,">0"&"*") What happened? The “>0”&”*” serves as the condition to filter out cells that contain hidden characters, thus only the ones with letters and numbers are counted. Want to know more about Google Sheets?Do you have more questions in mind about using Google Sheet? Check out our
other spreadsheet resources and learn more functions and tricks that you can use when working! How do I count all blank cells in Excel?Here is an arrow formula can help you to count cells ignoring zeros and blank cells. Select a blank cell that you want to put the counting result, and type this formula =COUNT(IF(A1:E5<>0, A1:E5)) into it, press Shift + Ctrl + Enter key to get the result.
Can you use Countif to count blank cells?You can also use COUNTIF and create a condition to count blank cells.
What function counts the number of cells in Excel?The COUNT function counts the number of cells that contain numbers, and counts numbers within the list of arguments. Use the COUNT function to get the number of entries in a number field that is in a range or array of numbers.
What is the formula for count blank?=COUNTBLANK(range)
The parameter of the COUNTBLANK function is: range – a range of cells where we want to count blank cells.
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