COUNT on Excel Video 189 to keep you out of trouble with Excel’s count functions. Today I’ll spend a few minutes reviewing three different counting functions in Excel.
COUNT does just what you’d expect; it counts the number of cells in a range. The catch is that COUNT only counts numbers, not text or anything else.
COUNTA counts all cells in the range that aren’t empty. COUNTBLANK only counts empty cells.
That all sounds pretty straight-forward. One thing to watch for is when you download data from your EHR to Excel. I’ve seen some programs fill blank cells with a space instead of leaving the cell empty. If you’re trying to count the number of patients, procedures, etc. with COUNTA, make sure you’re not counting cells that only have a space in them. You may end up counting things you didn’t intend to count.
