The COUNTA and COUNTIF functions are working as designed.
A cell with a blank space in it is not empty (it's a string of length
1), so is included in the COUNTA result.
COUNTIF will work, but asterisk is a special character. It's a
wildcard. You need to escape it to get a literal asterisk. The
escape character in Excel is the tilde (~). So you need to do
=COUNTIF(J10:J1731,"~*")
I don't know why you were also including single-quotes inside the
double-quotes. Doing so should result in 0, not 1722. And there's no
way you should be getting 1772 with that range in any case.
John
This mailing list archive is Copyright 1997-2026 by midrange.com and David Gibbs as a compilation work. Use of the archive is restricted to research of a business or technical nature. Any other uses are prohibited. Full details are available on our policy page. If you have questions about this, please contact
[javascript protected email address].
Operating expenses for this site are earned using the Amazon Associate program and Google Adsense.
midrange.com
