Microsoft Excel is one of the global leaders when it comes to financial computing and analyzing data. This iconic piece of software, ever since it got released from Microsoft, has been a firm favorite among all the major business organizations in the world for their day to day computing purposes. Excel has got a massive list of functions at its disposal which makes the lives of all the Excel consultants not just a tad bit easier but spares them from computing even trivial sums or products. One of these functions is the COUNTBLANK function and its primary purpose is to find and multiply elements of two or more arrays and add them up to get the results. This free Excel help article will offer a brief description of the Microsoft Excel CountBlank function.
It is quite common that many cells that are present in a spreadsheet are empty and are not at all considered by any function that computes on it. So it would obviously be better to know beforehand which cells are empty and which are filled. For this purpose the COUNTBLANK function is used. In a given range the function calculates the number of cells that are actually blank or empty. The syntax for the function is COUNTBLANK (range). Here range represents the field where the array range is to be mentioned i.e. the array name is to be specified with the numeric representations of the limits associated with them that are to be considered. Another fact about the COUNTBLANK function is that it not only can take up cells as its arguments but also numbers, texts etc for it as well and computes on them and returns the number of numerical values present in all of them.
Some examples that will make the user better understand the whole concept of the COUNTBLANK function is provided underneath and can be easily understood by anyone.
For example, if the function is passed as COUNTBLANK (A1:A10) then what happens is that the array column A is taken as the input column to be considered and the range mentioned is from 1 to 10, and it specifies that the array elements in A are to be considered from 1 to 10. Now in case there are 3 empty slots present in the whole of the 10 places then the COUNTBLANK function takes a note of it and returns a value of 3 specifying it. It is therefore very easy to implement.
One problem with COUNTBLANK function is that it can only compute on array members and not on any other numerical data that may be provided to it by the user. For example if a stream of data or numbers is provided by the user as its argument then it can’t detect any empty spot in it and therefore doesn’t return anything at all! So, it always has to be a range specified in terms of the name of an array from the spreadsheet. So, in that place it does have a disadvantage. But it has a strong distinction between empty and 0 valued cells. For example if a cell contains the value 0 specifically then it is not at all taken as blank as it has some value in it, be it 0. But if it is kept blank then it is counted by the function.
The COUNTBLANK function can’t however calculate the number of numerical data in a stream of numbers or anything but it can be used to calculate the non-empty slots in an array by simply subtracting the value it returns from the total array range to get the number of non-empty slots in it. The COUNT function however explicitly calculates the number of non-empty elements in an array or in a stream in its arguments. The COUNTA function has the extra feature on top of all the ones present in the COUNT function in that it can count Boolean values like TRUE and FALSE and error values to make use of them. COUNTIF and COUNTIFS functions are also there for counting items that pass a certain criterion provided by the user explicitly.
The COUNTBLANK function is regularly used by all Excel consultants across the world and it is therefore very popular when dealing with numerical value estimation. It is compatible with Excel 2000, 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011.