How to Count the Number of Cells With Text in Excel

Counting blank and non-blank cells is fairly straightforward, but what about the cells that have formulas in them that don’t return a result and look blank? They can distort those calculations. In this post, I’ll cover how to count the number of cells with text in an Excel spreadsheet (regardless of if they contain formulas or not), using multiple approaches.

I’ll use the table below for the basis of my calculations which includes some values that look empty (even though they aren’t).

In column A I have the numbers from 1 to 11 listed. In column B I have a formula to determine if the number in column A is even, and if it is, I will place the word EVEN as my result, otherwise, it will be blank. The formula I used is the MOD function, which tells me how many remainders there are after dividing by a number. It has two arguments: the number I want to divide, and by what factor. My formula in cell B2 looks as follows:

=IF(MOD(A2,2)=0,”EVEN”,””)

In the above example, I am dividing cell A2 (1) by 2 and saying if it equals 0 (suggesting no remainder), then I want the result to return the word EVEN, otherwise, I want the cell to be blank (“”). Since 1 divided by 2 does have a remainder, the result in column B is a blank value (“”). In the next row, since the number 2 does not have a remainder, the result in column B is “EVEN.”

All the cells from B2:B12 have formulas, although some look empty.

Using COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTIF Functions

The conventional way to count non-empty cells is using the COUNTA function. A:

>=COUNTA(B2:B12)

The above formula will return a result of 11, since all 11 cells in the range are not empty, which is correct. But this doesn’t tell me how many actually contain values. If I wanted to count how many cells had numbers, I would use the COUNT function. This won’t count text, however.

=COUNT(B2:B12)

The above formula yields a result of 0, since there are no numbers in that range, otherwise, it would have worked fine. One workaround I could do is the COUNTIF function. I can count the number of blanks(“”) in the range:

=COUNTIF(B2:B12,””)

This returns a result of 6. I could combine the COUNTIF and COUNTA functions to arrive at my answer as to the number of cells that contain values that aren’t formulas:

=COUNTA(B2:B12)-COUNTIF(B2:B12,””)

This will result in 11-6 = 5. In Excel, there is usually not one way to solve a problem, so I’ll show you another way to accomplish this.

Using An Array Formula

The great thing about array formulas is they allow you to do multiple things in one formula that you couldn’t otherwise do with regular formulas (at least, not in one step). I am going to use the LEN function which tells me the length of a cell. If a cell is empty, it will return 0. If there is even one letter or digit, LEN will equal 1. I want to evaluate every cell’s length, and then tally all those that have a length of at least 1.

The LEN function would look as follows:

=LEN(B2)

This will result in a value of 0, since cell B2 has nothing in there (even though a formula exists). It is a simple function with only one argument as you can see. I will go a bit further and combine it with an IF function to return a value of 1 if there is something in the cell, and a value of 0 if there is not.

=IF(LEN(B2)>0,1,0)

The last step is to use the SUM function to now total all these values. If the non-empty cells return values of 1, then I just need to sum them all of them to get my count. The formula (before turning into an array) looks like this:

=SUM(IF(LEN(B2:B11)>0,1,0))

All I have added is the SUM function before my IF function, as well as an additional closing bracket. To turn it into an array formula, when editing the cell I have to click CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER and my formula will now look as follows (on newer versions of Excel you don’t need to do this):

{=SUM(IF(LEN(B2:B12)>0,1,0))}

This will return a result of 5 which correctly returns the same result as when I combined the COUNTA and COUNTIF functions. Below is a summary of the results:

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