Counting Cells

[ammdumas]

I have a column of text where I want to count the total of cells that have data in it (i.e. 20 cells with one blank cell...total = 19).

I used the COUNTA formula which worked, but the moment I deleted one of the cells being counted, the count total didn't update at the bottom.

Is there an easy way to update the count total, or is the answer something stupid like the cell needs to be general vs text, etc?

 

[Seti]

Do you have manual recalculation turned on? I tried your example and as soon as I deleted the text in a cell, the COUNTA updated.

 

[ammdumas]

Funny. Never heard of that. Guess it's always been turned on because I've never had problems until now. Where would I do that?

 

[ammdumas]

Never mind. Figured it out. But new problem. In the case of a user using this spreadsheet, I noticed that if you use the space bar to delete whatever was in that cell, the count does not update. The formula seems to read the spaces as "Something" as opposed to "Nothing" and therefore counts it. I know we have idiot facot rhere but is there some way (i.e. conditional formatting) of excluding the spaces when the formula counts that field? I suppose I could disable the ASCII character in a macros but that seems a little much. Is there an easier way?