Re: [libreoffice-users] Counting cells

At 21:46 24/03/2021 -0600, Joe Conner wrote:
> I am confused about how to count a number of cells that have a 
> number. In Calc, if cells a1:a11 each may or may not have a number 
> in it, what formula may I use to count how many cells have a number? 
> I do not want the sum of the numbers, just how many cells contain a number.

This all depends on what you mean by "a number"! Do you just mean 
that the cell has something in it, so presumably a number - just 
anything, i.e. that the cell is not empty? If you mean specifically a 
number, do you include an explicit zero? And how about a cell that 
has a blank or blanks, which would be interpreted the same way as 
zero in many calculation contexts? Note that a cell containing blanks 
is different from an empty cell; you may or may not wish to include 
such cells. You probably won't want to include text strings such as 
"three", even though that is a number in one sense; but how about a 
cell containing a number expressed as digits but in the form of a 
text string, e.g. the character "3" as distinct from the numerical 
value 3? (This may arise from entering a number into a cell formatted 
as Text or by entering a leading apostrophe - or by pasting material 
from elsewhere.)

The COUNT() function ignores empty cells and those that contain text, 
so may well be all you need.

Otherwise you may like to consider formulae involving COUNTA() or 
COUNTIF(). Note also that it is sometimes easier to calculate the 
inverse of something, so you could consider using COUNTBLANK() (which 
should really be called COUNTEMPTY(), since it fails to include cells 
containing explicit blank spaces), and subtracting the result from 
the number of cells in the range.

Exactly what you choose to do depends on how resilient you want your 
spreadsheet to be to rogue or erroneous cell contents as a result of 
later errors on your part (we all make them) or on the part of others 
who may use the spreadsheet.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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