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How to Count Blank or Empty Cells in Google Sheets

Sometimes when working in spreadsheet programs like Google Sheets, you may want to know the number of cells in a range that are empty or blank.

There are a number of ways to do that in Google Sheets.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to count blank or empty cells in Google Sheets.

Table of Contents

COUNTBLANK Function

One of the best ways to count the number of empty or blank cells is by using the COUNTBLANK function.

This function will return the number of empty cells in a range.

The syntax of the COUNTBLANK function is:

=COUNTBLANK(value1, [value2,…])

  • value1 – the first value or range to count blank cells in
  • value2 – this is an optional argument. You can add additional ranges here.

Here is an example of this function would be used in a spreadsheet:

COUNTBLANK example

You can see in the example above the formula simply counts the empty cells when given the range. In the example data I have 3 empty cells so the formula returns 3.

COUNTIF Blank

With a little bit of creativity, you can also turn COUNTIF into a function that will count blank cells.

To do that you would need to use COUNTIF with this syntax:

=COUNTIF(range,””)

  • range – this is the range that you want to count
  • ”” – this simply tells COUNTIF to count empty cells

Here is an example of how this would be used in a spreadsheet:

COUNTIF empty cell example

The example above is very similar to the previous method except now I am using the COUNTIF function.

The first argument in the function contains the range of data that I want to count, and the second argument contains what I am counting. The double quotation marks “” with nothing in between means empty cell, so the formula returns 3 since there are 3 empty cells in the range.

Closing Thoughts

COUNTBLANK and COUNTIF are the best functions to count cells that are empty in your spreadsheet. They are both very easy to use and only take a matter of seconds to set up.

Try both methods and this should stick in your memory pretty quickly. We hope you found this tutorial informative!

More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Count Unique Values
How to Count Non-Blank Cells
How to Use the ISBLANK Function