Instead, you can combine two of Excel's most straightforward functions to make the program do the work for you. As at the time of writing (May 2025), although the COUNTA function is available on ...

Probably the most frequently used function in Excel (or any other spreadsheet program), =SUM does just that ... and the punctuation in cell C8. Use the COUNTA function if you want to include ...

It’s faster to click AutoSum>SUM (notice that Excel ... COUNTA counts everything—that is, alpha and numeric characters plus punctuation, symbols, and even spaces. Why use the COUNT function?