Formula Friday – How To Count Cells That Contain Text Using COUNTIF


Hello Excellers, welcome to another #Exceltips blog post in my 2021 series. recently I have been counting cells with text in my Excel worksheet. So, I thought it would be a great Excel tip to share.

So, do you need to count how many cells that contain text?. I have used this technique to how many rows in my Excel data set contain any text. For example, the text references in my data represent a particular type of customer, which I can easily count with the formula COUNTIF and a wildcard! 

So, here is a speedy way to count how many of your cells contain text. (That is not numbers, not errors, not blanks). 

Let’s work through an extract of my data set.

counting cells that contain text in Excel

I want to see how many of my customers have text in their customer_id.    The syntax of the COUNTIF formula is

=COUNTIF(range, criteria)

Where

range= the range of cells from which you want to count non blank cells

criteria = the condition, i.e a number, expression or text that determines which cells should be counted.

We can use the wildcard *  as the criteria argument in our formula, to search for ANY text in our customer_id data range. The wildcard is surrounded by quotation marks (” “).

count cells with text

Excel has correctly identified that I have 2 customers in my list that contain some type of text characters.  Job Done!. Easy as that. A simple way of counting cells with text in Excel.

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Barbara

Barbara is an experienced data analyst with over 20 years of experience. Author of the How To Excel At Excel Top 50 Excel tips Ebook, YouTuber and Excel Blogger.

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