Count Not Blank Cells - COUNTA Function

Today in this article I will discuss about the excel function COUNTA, a very small inbuilt function in Microsoft Excel.

Let us first discuss about this function then we will discuss where can we use it and how we can implement this function.

Description

As the name suggest the Microsoft Excel COUNTA function counts the number of cells that are not empty as well as the number of value arguments provided.

Syntax

The syntax for the COUNTA function in Microsoft Excel is:

=COUNTA(value1, value2, ...)

Parameters or Arguments

value1, value2, ...

Each argument can be a range, a cell or a value. There can be up to 255 arguments.

Returns

The COUNTA function returns a numeric value.

Note : Please remember this function returns not empty cell count, therefore, a blank space will also be counted. I strongly recommend to use TRIM function (if the data is very big) before applying COUNTA or use TRIM nested.

How to use COUNTA function ?

1.   Select a cell, then

2.   Type ‘=’ sign in that cell or in the formula bar

3.   Type ‘COUNTA(‘ or type COU, a drop down list will appear, select COUNTA, press TAB button

4.   Select the range or alternatively you can type the range as we do in the basic SUM function. Hit enter.

5.   Done.

6.   This is simple. Now to select multiple columns in a single function you need to put a comma then repeat the step 4

COUNTA Function

Where to use COUNTA ?

Examples of COUNTA function :

Everybody needs a tracker to maintain tasks. We first schedule our tasks and then complete these one after another and when one task is completed we mark a tick or ‘OK’ or some other notation to track how much closer we are to complete the overall task.

Here I have given a fictitious task tracker of a day, if any task is completed I mark it as ‘Done’.

COUNTA Function

We can use COUNTA nested with other functions like INDEX or SUMPRODUCT, we will discuss it in another article.

I hope this article is informative & you enjoyed this article.

Thank you for reading…