=LEN(A1)

This includes spaces and other non-visible characters.

Regards,
Paul

--

"ty" wrote in message
...
Here are 5000 or so genes for a bacterial genome listed in my Excell 2007.
There are two columns. col (1) lists the gene names and col(2) lists the
corresponding nucleotides sequence like ATTCGGGG.....

is there a simple way to count the number of nucleotides (characters) in
each cell?