EXCEL FUNCTIONS-COUNT

INTRODUCTION

COUNT FUNCTION comes under the STATISTICAL FUNCTIONS category in Excel.

COUNT function , as the name suggests, does the counting job in Excel. It counts the numbers, dates, number stored as text only and skips every other data.

COUNT FUNCTION is very helpful when we need to use some nested functions to make a check on the number of cells containing the number or number type of data.

One more usage of this function will be when we start learning VBA, we’ll be needing a lot of functions to know the status of the sheet so that we can decide what to do further.

Let us learn ,how to use this function.

PURPOSE OF COUNT FUNCTION IN EXCEL

COUNT FUNCTION returns the total number of cells containing number, dates or number in text format in a given range.

PREREQUISITES TO LEARN COUNT FUNCTION

THERE ARE A FEW PREREQUISITES WHICH WILL ENABLE YOU TO UNDERSTAND THIS FUNCTION IN A BETTER WAY.

•  Basic understanding of how to use a formula or function.
•  Basic understanding of rows and columns in Excel.
• Some information about the STATISTICAL terms is an advantage for the use of such formulas.
•  Of course, Excel software.

Helpful links for the prerequisites mentioned above

What Excel does? How to use formula in Excel?

SYNTAX: COUNT FUNCTION

The Syntax for the function is

=COUNT(cell1, cell3, cell3….) or

=COUNT(cell1 : cell2)  direct range

cells These are the data. It can be a cell address, or value, or a date directly or contained in a cell.

EXAMPLE:COUNT FUNCTION IN EXCEL

DATA SAMPLE

Let us take a mixed data consisting of numbers, dates, numbers as text and text etc. so that we can check the working of function COUNT.

The data used is shown below.

STEPS TO USE COUNT FUNCTION-EXAMPLE

STEPS:

1. Place the cursor in the cell and type the following function

=COUNT(D6:D19)

2. Press ENTER, the answer will appear as 9.

3.For manually checking the answer, we tried to find the individual results too. For that we put

=COUNT(D6) in the cell E6 and dragged to get the result for every data. We counted the number and it came out to be 9 which proves the function.

*NOTE: There was a discrepancy with this kind of data “54641”. The function didn’t treat it as a number. So be very clear that if this data is given to the function through the ARRAY OR RANGE, it won’t be treated as number but if given directly as a value, it’ll be treated as a number.

GENERALIZED STEPS TO USE COUNT FUNCTION

HERE ARE THE STEPS TO USE COUNT FUNCTION

• Type the function
• =COUNT(DATA1, DATA2….) OR COUNT(RANGE) in the cell where we want the result.
• Press ENTER and the result will appear.