Let's see what each part of the formula actually does. The formula below will do the word count for you.
The formula is going to be a compound formula utilizing several basic Excel functions. Luckily, using the basic Excel functions and combining them into a compound formula allows you to achieve this. With this in mind, in order to count the words in Excel, you have to use a formula that accounts for all the possible holes. In that case, the word count result should be zero though counting the spaces will yield another, higher, result. For instance, if you have typed multiple spaces between words, then all of those spaces will be mistakenly counted as words, resulting in more words than there are.Īnother hole would be when a cell contains nothing but space or spaces. Related: Microsoft Excel Autofill Tricks to Build Spreadsheets Faster What Should the Formula Consider? Zero spaces, summed with one, will tell you that you have one word in your cell. If you have a single word in your cell, you won't have any spaces. To calculate the number of words, you'll have to count the spaces and sum the result with one. Therefore, if you have four spaces in a sentence, you have five words.
When you're talking about counting words in a text, you are, in fact, trying to count the spaces between the words.
