How to use COUNT Function in MS-Excel

Nowadays, every business relies on some spreadsheet program and MS-Excel is one of the major spreadsheets program.

If you are following our tutorial and instructions, then no need to introduce you to MS-Excel again. Today, we are going to learn a simple yet very useful topic in Excel. Though it’s very easy to learn but need some practice over and over to get used to it. We will instruct you in this tutorial, how to use Count Function and some variants of Count Function.

For this tutorial, we will use some functions in a writing form and some own created excel sheet and sample data and also some screenshot for learning purposes.

We will perform the Operations in a very simple manner because we generally consider that our audience and learners are the beginners in MS-Excel. So, we give them thorough instructions but in a short way.

Without furthermore delay, let’s jump to our today’s topic, i.e. – “HOW TO USE COUNT FUNCTION IN MS-EXCEL”.

By definition, Count Function counts the number of cells containing numbers in the cells. A question arises in your mind, what sort of things you would like to count? Well, the answer will be, you can count any numeric value including the number of cells by selecting an item, using cell reference or defining the range of cells as arguments passed in the Function.

One important thing to remember, Count Function can count all numeric values including negative values, dates, time and so on but only empty cells and text values cannot be counted by Count Function.

But, there is also built-in CountA Function available in excel which counts the number of cells containing numbers as well as text.

The main difference between them is that Count Function only counts cells containing numbers but CountA counts all cells that aren’t empty. That means CountA generally count anything.

Again, keep in mind that, Count Function only count numeric values while CountA can count numeric values as well as texts and characters.

Now, you may think, in which situation, you need to use Count Function! Maybe, you are working with an excel sheet with a list of invited people for a meeting and you need to count the number of people who attend the meeting. Or, suppose you need to find out the total number of employee in an office. By using a Count Function in Excel you can very easily & precisely count the number of employee of that office.

Basic syntax of COUNT & COUNTA FUNCTION

=COUNT(value1,[value2],…)

                   and

=COUNTA(value1,[value2],…)

Now, let’s take a look on the below screenshot of our excel sheet which consists of very few amounts of sample data so that you can easily cope with the basics of Count Function.

In the image, you can see that, you want to count the number of employee by EMP_ID and by looking at the presented data which is ID’s starting from Cell A2 (211) to Cell A10 (121) we can say that, there is only 9 employee available. 

But, in Excel we will write a simple Count Function and pass some arguments and it will automatically count the number of employee. In the next image, you will see the Count Function using for our excel sheet to count the number of employee by using EMP_ID. (Follow the blue marked arrows for the clarification)

Try to practice with your own data and CountA Function also work in a same manner. You can also see a Function named COUNTIF and this function also work as like as other two functions but for COUNTIF Function we need to pass the arguments – the range and some comparable reference as a criteria. We will elaborately give you a lesson of COUNTIF in some other tutorial as soon as possible. We will not extend our today’s topic anymore and hope you guys got a little idea about how a Count and CountA Function work in MS-Excel. So, we suggest, keep practicing with more and more data and find differences between your results & observe closely. Soon you will understand the functions completely and encourage others to learn these basic things.

If you have doubt or you do not understand a thing of this tutorial, then ask us via comment or contact us via our CONTACT page, we will get back to you with your answers. Thank you for your support and stay with tutorialabc for better content. 

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