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Excel COUNTA Practice Question: Quantities are in B2:B9. Some cells hold the text n/a and some are empty. How…

By Rinkesh Shah, founder of Cellgrids.

The question

Quantities are in B2:B9. Some cells hold the text n/a and some are empty. How many cells have an entry (number or text)? Put it in D2.

The data

	A	B	D
1	Item	Qty	Result
2	Item 1	120	?
3	Item 2	n/a
4	Item 3	95
5	Item 4
6	Item 5	210
7	Item 6	n/a
8	Item 7
9	Item 8	160

The yellow cell is where your answer goes.

Show answer

Answer in D2: 6

How it works

Explanation: Unlike COUNT, COUNTA also counts text. COUNT would return 4 here.
Syntax: =COUNTA(B2:B9)
120, n/a, 95, 210, n/a and 160 are entries, so 6.

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COUNTA syntax

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

Counts how many cells in a range are not empty. COUNTA is used in data analysis work to summarize or test patterns across a data set. Full COUNTA guide.