Use the COUNT and COUNTA functions

- [Instructor] A viable tool in Excel is what we call the status bar. It's at the bottom of the screen just below the sheet tabs. Big wide gray area. In this worksheet here, 6 or 700 rows, I'm going to click on column G and some information appears in that status bar that's kind of interesting. First of all, the total certainly is not, the high number might or might not be, but here are two entries that tell me something. Numerical count 660, meaning there's 660 cells in column G that have numbers in them.

You can see of course that G1 doesn't have a number and G4 also G18 have text in them. Just to the left of this we see count 699. Count means how many cells have any kind of data whatsoever. So 699 cells have data, 660 of them have numbers. By inference then, we can subtract that and figure out how many of these people have been here less than 1 year. Notice now we see nothing in the status bar. Anytime you highlight two or more cells with values you will see information in the status bar.

And even if you click on cells that have no numbers whatsoever. For example, if I click column C, that tells me something in the status bar there's only one entry, count 699. Now possibly you're not seeing that many entries in the status bar. So if you right click in the status bar you will see a huge list here of checks and potential checks. It's the six right in here that we care about. Now I'm not making a strong case for saying always keep these checked. I do because I just find it handy. And why not get some of this information? And it does work with entire columns as we've seen already.

And it's really handy. It's an onscreen verifier at times. You're just curious about this or that. And it will work with date columns if the entire column has been formatted the same way. So when I click column F here, it tells me at the bottom of the screen off to the right and at first maybe it's not obvious but max means what? The highest entry here. February 18th, that's the latest or the highest hire date that we see in the column. And the person who's been here the longest was hired March 10th, 1997.

And once again we see numerical count 698, count 699, difference of one. Of course that's cell F1. Now I'm going to click column H. Here's something a little strange. And I'm not saying you will use this feature for this reason, but now when we look at the bottom of the screen we see count 699, like many of the other columns here, 699 cells have data. 697 have numbers, what's going on there? Well you sharp eyed observers there might have noticed, this is not really a number.

That's one capital O one. Remember, zero and the letter O are next to each other on the keyboard. So if we make a change there, that should be one zero one two three zero. One zero one two three zero. And of course you don't always find these when they're down in row 300 or wherever. But anyway, now when we click Column H we see that those two numbers make sense. Now, there are two functions that do similar things here and there can be some confusion about this. Here's a function called count.

Based on what we've seen at the bottom of the screen, remember count told us at the bottom of the screen how many cells have data. But the function count, and I'm going to use it on column H here, will tell us how many cells have numbers. 698. So as I click column H what do we see at the bottom of the screen? Count says 699, remember that counts cells with data. Numerical count 698, that counts cells with numbers. And that accounts for the difference here. So that function called count is counting numbers, 698.

Its companion function, and I'll just copy this downward cuz it's almost the same, is countA, like a alphanumeric, or maybe just think of all. That gives us the other numbers. So countA of course is analogous to the entry we see at the bottom of the screen called count. Count is analogous to the number we see at the bottom of the screen for numerical count. So potential source of confusion as we said. But both of these, these functions and the ability to use the status bar are valuable features in excel that allow us to tabulate information without long extended formulas.