How come COUNTBLANK gives the wrong answer?

[teachman]

Hello,

I have a column with 1034 rows. 326 of the cells in that column are empty; I did the count the hard way. The remaining have "Missing" as their value. Now, I just want to know how many cells are empty/blank. There are no cells with formulas so the 326 are truly empty. I tried COUNTBLANK - =countblank(A1:a1034) The result is 811. It doesn't make any sense to me. Out of 1034 cells 326 are truly empty/blank; so 1034-326 should be the number of cells with the word "Missing" in them. But, 1034 - 326 = 708. I count 811 cells with "Missing" in them. What kind of math is Excel doing? How come the COUNTBLANK is counting more than blank cells?

 

[DanteAmor]

You could upload a copy of your file to a free site such www.dropbox.com. Once you do that, mark it for 'Sharing' and you will be given a link to the file that you can post here. If the workbook contains confidential information, you could replace it with generic data.