Occasionally I get asked if people can get a total of one value. What they usually mean is how many times does something appear in a list. For example if you are organising an event and have a column for attending, within this column you type Y for yes, and N for not attending.
There are a couple of numbers you may want to get from this list, how many people have replied in total. The example I give my delegstes to find out the function is if I had some Jelly beans in my hand, how would you find out how many I had?
Count them!
That is exactly what we are going to do with our list. There are several count functions available, today I am only going to look at two of them. CountA will count non- blank cells. In this case wi want to know how many people have replied, as wi only type in a Y or N if they have told is they are attending or not this column will have blanks if they have not replied.
If our data is in cells B2 to B20 our calculation Will look like this:
=CountA (B2:B20)
We would not include any headings in this range as they would count as 1 being a non blank. If we want to find out how many people have not replied then we would want to count the blanks, we would use CountBlank
=CountBlank (B2:B20)
In Part 2 I will look at another function for more counting!