🖐️5 Ways to COUNT in Excel – Essential Excel Beginner Skills☝️

In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the five different ways that you can utilize count in Excel to perform counts on different things. Because count is one of those big five Excel functions that everybody who uses Excel needs to know. So it's good to learn the different types of count function and how they differ from one another. So without further ado, let's dive straight in. Now the data set that I'm going to be working with is a very small one, just to keep things nice and simple. And you can see next to it, I've got count, countA, countIf, countIfs, and countBlack. So these are the five counting methods that you're going to come across when you're working in Excel. So what's the difference between them? How are they useful? Now the first little quick tip I'm going to give you is if you don't already have this turned on, push your mouse down to where we have the status bar and right click. Because what you'll see is a little customized status bar menu. And if you don't have average count, numerical count, so on and so forth turned on, then you are really missing out. Because if we turn these on, it means that when we select a range of numbers, we're going to see the sum, the min, the max, the average, the count in that status bar. And that can be really useful if you just want to quickly see the results of these formulas without actually having to do the formula. So now that I've turned these on, if I was to select the employee list, check out the status bar. Because I've got text in this column, it's got nothing to sum, but it's telling me that the count is eight. So that can be really useful. Now, speaking of count, let's do our first one. We're just going to do a very basic count. Now, something to be aware of here. When you're using count, if I was to select the salary column, for example, close the bracket and hit enter, it's going to return the correct result. I have eight items in that list. However, if you do a count and select a column that contains text and close the bracket, it's not going to work because the count function will only count cells that contain numerical values. So that's an important distinction, which leads me on to the next point. If you want to count everything, regardless of whether it has numeric values or text, that is where you would use count A. So now if I select this text column, close the bracket and hit enter, I'm going to get my result. So that's the main difference between count and count A. One counts everything. One only counts numeric values. Now, what's count if? Well, count if is where we do a count, but we include one piece of criteria, one condition. So this is actually a logical function. So let's see how it works. Now, notice with count if we have two arguments, range and criteria. So looking at my data, maybe I want to count how many employees we have in the sales team. So I'm doing a count, but I'm adding the condition of sales. So my criteria is going to be sales. My range will be where I'm going to find that criteria. So my range is going to be this range just here, and my criteria is sales. Now, I don't have that written out anywhere, so I'm just going to type it in in quote marks, close the bracket, hit enter, and it's now telling me that I have three people who work in the sales team. Let's move that on a stage and move on to count ifs, because this is the same as doing a count if. It's a count with conditions, but this time we can have more than one condition. So count if only allows us one, count ifs allows us one or multiple conditions. So we're going to do something very similar. So let's do count ifs, and maybe this time I want to see how many employees we have who work in the sales team who have a salary of over $40,000. So I have two pieces of criteria here. My first piece of criteria is the sales team, so my first criteria range is going to be the department. Criteria one is sales, and now I can move on to my second piece of criteria is that I'm only counting where the salary is greater than $40,000. So my criteria range two is going to be the salary, and my criteria is going to be greater than $40,000. And I can see I have one employee that those criteria match. The final option is count blank, and this is pretty much what it says on the tin. It's going to count any blank cells that you have in your selected range. So currently, if I was to use count blank and select, let's say, the employees, the result is going to be zero because I don't have any blank cells. But check out what happens if I was to insert a blank row. That's going to change to one because there's now a blank cell in that range. So that is the main differences between the top five most popular count functions in Excel. If you enjoyed this video, then smash that like button. Give me a little follow. It really does help me out, and I will see you in the next video.