Counting cell entries

[jc132568]

Dear experts,
I have one column, C. In this column is a VLOOKUP to another range of cells
in another workbook. The Lookup returns whatever comment has been typed into
a particular cell on the other sheet. I want to count the number of times
comments have been entered and display it underneath the column C.

When I use COUNTA, it returns the total number of cells because the vlookup
returns the number zero if there is no comment so this gets counted as an
entry. The comments I want to count are entries like Fail, resit. Not
everyone gets a comment. How can I be more specific about what I want COUNTA
to count i.e. don't count zeros.
Thanks
Martina
PS I could count the entries from the original sheet but I just wanted to
know if it was possible to count entries in columns which have vlookups
creating the data.

 

[T. Valko]

Try this:

=COUNTIF(C1:C100,"*")

This will count *only* TEXT entries.

 

[RagDyeR]

However, will also count nulls ( "" ), although technically, those zero
length strings *are* text.

To count only text, and *not* count nulls:

=Countif(C1:C100,"*?")

--

Regards,

RD
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Please keep all correspondence within the Group, so all may benefit !
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Try this:

=COUNTIF(C1:C100,"*")

This will count *only* TEXT entries.

 

[jc132568]

Thank you both, fixed my problem.
Many thanks
Martina

 

[RagDyer]

Appreciate the feed-back.