Count Total Characters In A Cell

Explanation

The LEN function is fully automatic. In the example, the formula in the active cell is:

=LEN(B5)

The LEN function simply counts all characters that appear in a cell. All characters are counted, including space characters, as you can see in cell C9.

Numbers

Numbers in Excel (including dates, times, currency, etc.) are often formatted with a number format . It’s important to understand that the characters that makeup numbers are counted in their raw form (i.e. number formatting is not included). For example, because Excel dates are serial numbers , the result in cell C11 is 5, since the date in B11 is actually the number 42005.

Explanation

SUMPRODUCT accepts the range B3:B6 as an array of four cells. For each cell in the array, LEN calculates the length of the text as a number. The result is an array that contains 4 numbers. SUMPRODUCT then sums the items in this array and returns the total.