Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Counting Cells with Specific Characters.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 10, 2020)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003
Let's say that you have a worksheet that contains all the people who have ever worked in your department. Each name is prefaced by a single character that indicates the status of the person. For instance, if Fred Davis were retired, his name might show up as "RFred Davis". With quite a lot of these names in the worksheet, you may need a way to count those people with a specific status character.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to use the COUNTIF function. If, for instance, the status character is the letter R (for "retired"), and your range of names is in cells A5:A52, then you could use the following to determine which cells begin with the letter R:
=COUNTIF(A5:A52,"R*")
The formula works because the comparison value is R*, which means "the letter R followed by any other characters." Excel dutifully returns the count. To search for a different status character, simply replace R with the desired status character.
Obviously, if the asterisk has a special meaning in this usage, you can't search directly for an asterisk. Actually, there are three characters you cannot search for directly: the asterisk (*), the question mark (?) and the tilde (~). If you want to search for any of these characters, you must precede the character with the tilde. Thus, if you wanted to determine a count of names that had a question mark as a status code, you could use the following:
=COUNTIF(A5:A52,"~?*")
An alternative to using COUNTIF is to create an array formula that is applied to every cell in the range. The following will do the trick very nicely:
=SUM((LEFT(A5:A52,1)="R")*1)
This must, of course, be entered as an array formula. This means that instead of pressing Enter at the end of the formula, you would press Shift+Ctrl+Enter. The formula checks the left-most character of a cell, returning the value TRUE if it is R or FALSE if it is not. The multiplication is done to convert the TRUE/FALSE value to a number, either 1 for TRUE or 0 for FALSE. The SUM function returns the sum, or count, of all the cells that meet the criteria.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2342) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Counting Cells with Specific Characters.
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2018-11-26 12:28:52
ROY
Liz, you can use SUBSTITUTE() and LEN() to achieve that:
Say you are looking for "B", "L", and "c" in cell A1:
=( (LEN(A1) - LEN( SUBSTITUTE(A1, "B", "")) + (LEN(A1) - LEN( SUBSTITUTE(A1, "L", "")) + (LEN(A1) - LEN( SUBSTITUTE(A1, "c", "")) )
It will NOT yield an error if the count is zero for a letter so no need for error handling.
(SUBSTITUTE() is case sensitive so it will distinguish between "B" and "b" and so on. As the saying goes though: "However it is case sensitive so...": you must watch case, or allow for it, when entering the letters, which is easier if you do the following.)
It is also happy to accept cell references for the search text (the letters) so you can have an easily changed list of letters to check for. NOT a RANGE of references in a one-third of the above formula, but individual cell references. If you do that, you can watch for some entry errors like they should all be upper case or lower case by wrapping the reference in the applicable function:
SUBSTITUTE( A1, UPPER( N7 ), "")
Also worth mentioning while using SUBSTITUTE(), there are quite a few uses that compare a cell/string length before and after using SUBSTITUTE().
2018-03-06 12:55:59
Liz
In the same column I need to count multiple different letters to make one total of the different letters. Any assistance would be helpful!
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here:
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