COUNT & COUNTIF — Excel guide
Counting cells: COUNT for numbers, COUNTA for anything, COUNTBLANK for gaps, and COUNTIF/COUNTIFS for counting by condition.
COUNTIF
Count the cells in a range meeting one condition.
- Wildcards: * any characters, ? exactly one, ~* a literal asterisk.
- Duplicate flagging: =COUNTIF($A$2:A2, A2)>1 filled down marks second-and-later occurrences.
- "<>" counts non-blanks; "*" counts only TEXT cells (misses numbers and dates).
COUNTIFS
Count rows meeting SEVERAL conditions at once.
- Conditions AND together — a between-count is two criteria on the SAME column (">=10", "<=20").
- "East OR West" needs two COUNTIFs added; the same cell can't be both.
COUNT
Count NUMBERS only (dates included — they're numbers).
- COUNT returning 0 on a 'date' column exposes text impostors.
- COUNTA counts anything non-empty — including formulas returning "", which is why COUNTA and COUNTBLANK can overlap.