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Excel COUNT Practice Question: Absent students are marked AB. Using COUNT, find how many students appeared…

By Rinkesh Shah, founder of Cellgrids.

The question

Absent students are marked AB. Using COUNT, find how many students appeared and put it in E2. Then find how many were absent (use COUNTA minus COUNT) and put it in E3.

The data

	A	B	D	E
1	Student	Marks	Label	Result
2	Gita	56	Appeared	?
3	Hari	AB	Absent	?
4	Iqbal	71
5	Jaya	AB
6	Karan	64
7	Leena	48

The yellow cells are where your answer goes.

Show answer

Expected results:

E2 = 4
E3 = 2

How it works

Explanation: COUNT counts numbers only, while COUNTA counts everything that is not empty. The difference between them is the number of text entries.
Syntax: =COUNT(B2:B7) and =COUNTA(B2:B7)-COUNT(B2:B7)
Numbers: 56, 71, 64, 48 gives 4. All entries: 6. Absent = 6 - 4 = 2.

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COUNT syntax

=COUNT(value1, [value2], ...)

Counts how many cells in a range contain numbers. COUNT is used in data analysis work to summarize or test patterns across a data set. Full COUNT guide.