Count cells that contain any text

Question

I want to count the cells that contain anything within a range. Any cell that contain text, or numbers or something else should do a plus one in my result-cell.

I found this function,

countif(range; criteria)

but this doesn't work for me, because I don't know what to type in the criteria. How can I do this?

Answer 1

You can pass "<>" (including the quotes) as the parameter for criteria. This basically says, as long as its not empty/blank, count it. I believe this is what you want.

=COUNTIF(A1:A10, "<>") 

Otherwise you can use CountA as Scott suggests

Answer 2

COUNTIF function will only count cells that contain numbers in your specified range.

COUNTA(range) will count all values in the list of arguments. Text entries and numbers are counted, even when they contain an empty string of length 0.

Example: Function in A7 =COUNTA(A1:A6)

Range:

A1 a

A2 b

A3 banana

A4 42

A5

A6

A7 4 -> result

Google spreadsheet function list contains a list of all available functions for future reference https://support.google.com/drive/table/25273?hl=en.

Answer 3

If you have cells with something like ="" and don't want to count them, you have to subtract number of empty cells from total number of cell by formula like

=row(G101)-row(G4)+1-countblank(G4:G101)

In case of 2-dimensional array it would be

=(row(G101)-row(A4)+1)*(column(G101)-column(A4)+1)-countblank(A4:G101)

Tested at google docs.

Answer 4

Sample file

Note:

• Tried to find the formula for counting non-blank cells (="" is a blank cell) without a need to use data twice. The solution for goolge-spreadhseet: =ARRAYFORMULA(SUM(IFERROR(IF(data="",0,1),1))). For excel ={SUM(IFERROR(IF(data="",0,1),1))} should work (press Ctrl+Shift+Enter in the formula).

Answer 5

The criterium should be "?*" and not "<>" because the latter will also count formulas that contain empty results, like ""

So the simplest formula would be

=COUNTIF(Range,"?*")