How to count characters in excel?

Count characters in excel

After this blog you will be able to count total characters in a cell, occurrences of specific character or character combination in a cell with both case sensitive and insensitive alternatives.

Excel LEN Function:

Excel LEN function returns the length of a given text string as the number of characters. LEN will also count characters in numbers, but number formatting is not included.

Len function in excel

Excel SUBSTITUTE Function:

Excel SUBSTITUTE function replaces text in a given string by matching. For example =SUBSTITUTE(“952-455-7865″,”-“,””) returns “9524557865”; the dash is stripped. SUBSTITUTE is case-sensitive and does not support wildcards.

Substitute function in excel



How to Count characters in Excel using LEN and SUBSTITUTE?

count cell image


Character count of a single cell using LEN:

Use LEN to count specific characters in Excel so follow these steps:

  • Click the cell you would like to place the character count in.
  • After that, type =LEN(cell) , where cell is the actual cell you want to get the character count of.
len formula cell image
  • Click on any other cell and the character count will appear.
len formula cell image
  • You can simply copy the content of the cell you want to get the character count of, paste it in the formula in place of the reference cell, and wrap it in quotation marks.
len formula cell image


Characters count of a multiple cell using LEN:

Use LEN to count specific characters in Excel so follow these steps:

  • The LEN function in Excel counts the number of characters in a cell.
len formula cell image
  • Use SUM and LEN to count the number of characters in a range of cells.
len formula cell image
  • The array formula below counts the number of characters in a range of cells.
len formula cell image


Characters count of a multiple cell using SUBSTITUTE:

Use SUBSTITUTE to count specific characters in Excel so follow these steps:

  • Use SUBSTITUTE to count how many times a specific character occurs in a cell.
Substitute formula cell image
  • The array formula below counts how many times a specific character occurs in a range of cells.
Substitute formula cell image
  • The array formula below counts both lower and upper case occurrences of a specific character.
Substitute formula cell image

Hope this post is helpful to you. Thank you!!