Skip to content
Free Excel Tutorials
  • Home
  • Excel For Beginners
  • Excel Intermediate
  • Advanced Excel For Experts

Data Analysis

  • How to Create Gantt Chart in Excel
  • How to Create Area Chart in Excel
  • Chart Axes in Excel
  • Conditional Formatting Data bars Examples in Excel
  • How to calculate current stock or inventory in Excel

References

  • Two-column Lookup in Excel
  • How to use Excel INDIRECT Function
  • Multi-criteria lookup and transpose in Excel
  • Get nth match with INDEX / MATCH in Excel
  • How to use Excel MATCH Function

Data Validations

  • Excel Data validation must contain specific text
  • Excel Data validation allow uppercase only
  • Excel Data validation unique values only
  • Excel Data validation allow weekday only
  • Excel Data validation no punctuation

How to count specific characters in a cell in Excel

by

To count how many times a specific character appears in a cell, you can use a formula based on the SUBSTITUTE and LEN functions.

Formula

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"a",""))

Explanation

 

In the example, the active cell contains this formula:

=LEN(B3)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B3,C3,""))

How this formula works

This formula works by using SUBSTITUTE to first remove all of the characters being counted in the source text. Then the length of the text (with the character removed) is subtracted from the length of the original text. The result is the number of characters that were removed with SUBSTITUTE, which is equal to the count of those characters.

Upper and lower case

SUBSTITUTE is a case sensitive function, so it will match case when running a substitution. If you need to count both upper and lower case occurrences of a specific character, use the UPPER function inside SUBSTITUTE to convert the text to uppercase before running the substitution. Then supply an uppercase character as the text that’s being substituted like this:

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A1),"A",""))

Post navigation

Next Post:

Create One-dimensional and Two-dimensional Array

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Learn Basic Excel

Ribbon
Workbook
Worksheets
Format Cells
Find & Select
Sort & Filter
Templates
Print
Share
Protect
Keyboard Shortcuts

Categories

  • Charts
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Validation
  • Excel Functions
    • Cube Functions
    • Database Functions
    • Date and Time Functions
    • Engineering Functions
    • Financial Functions
    • Information Functions
    • Logical Functions
    • Lookup and Reference Functions
    • Math and Trig Functions
    • Statistical Functions
    • Text Functions
    • Web Functions
  • Excel VBA
  • Excel Video Tutorials
  • Formatting
  • Grouping
  • Others

Logical Functions

  • SWITCH function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • How to return blank in place of #DIV/0! error in Excel
  • IF function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • Complete List of Excel Logical Functions, References and Examples
  • Not Equal To ‘<>‘ operator in Excel

Date Time

  • DATE function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • Get project midpoint in Excel
  • How to calculate workdays per month in Excel
  • Get days between dates ignoring years in Excel
  • Add business days to date in Excel

Grouping

  • Calculate conditional mode with criteria in Excel
  • Running count group by n size in Excel
  • Group numbers with VLOOKUP in Excel
  • Group times into unequal buckets in Excel
  • Categorize text with keywords in Excel

General

  • Cell References: Relative, Absolute and Mixed Referencing Examples
  • How to set or clear a print area in Excel Worksheet
  • Print Excel Sheet In Landscape Or Portrait
  • Excel Autofill Cell Ranges, Copy, Paste
  • How to generate random date between two dates in Excel
© 2025 xlsoffice . All Right Reserved. | Teal Smiles | Abbreviations And Their Meaning