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Excel Training Hints & Tips

Count and CountA in Excel

What’s the difference between Count and CountA in Excel?

The Count function is one of the 400 functions in Excel. Count as the name suggests, counts the number of cells selected that contain numbers. You can use the Count function to obtain the number of values within a range, rather than the total of those values.

If we wanted to count the number of values between A1 and A7 we could use the formula

=COUNT(A1:A7)

Countfx

Countresult

This has counted the number of values in the list.

If you have text in that range, Count behaves differently.

Countntwrk

The result is 6, because Count has a limitation. Count only returns the number of values present, it doesn’t include text.

To overcome this, we can use another, similar function, CountA.

So the difference between Count and CountA in Excel is that CountA will return the number of values and text in a list.

Counta

Countaresult
using count and counta in Excel will produce different results

If you need to find out have many numbers you have, use Count.

If you have text, or a mixture of text and values, use CountA.

An example of CountA could be when you require the total number of Staff in a list. You can see this in the practice example below.

Countareal

Additional resources

What is the difference between Count and CountA?

CountA function

By Richard Bailey

I love what I do; I get to work with an outstanding team to help hundreds of people with their challenges. I’ve learnt a lot from the teams I’ve worked with, no matter the size or industry we all have challenges to overcome, difficult customers, creating a budget or keeping a project on track.