What’s the difference between Count and CountA in Excel?
The Count function is one of the 400 functions in Excel. Count as the name suggests, counts the number of cells selected that contain numbers. You can use the Count function to obtain the number of values within a range, rather than the total of those values.
If we wanted to count the number of values between A1 and A7 we could use the formula
=COUNT(A1:A7)
This has counted the number of values in the list.
If you have text in that range, Count behaves differently.
The result is 6, because Count has a limitation. Count only returns the number of values present, it doesn’t include text.
To overcome this, we can use another, similar function, CountA.
So the difference between Count and CountA in Excel is that CountA will return the number of values and text in a list.
If you need to find out have many numbers you have, use Count.
If you have text, or a mixture of text and values, use CountA.
An example of CountA could be when you require the total number of Staff in a list. You can see this in the practice example below.
