=len(a1)
will tell you the length of the string in A1.

=(len(a1)-len(substitute(a1,b1,"")))/len(b1)
will tell you the number of times B1 appears in A1.

ty wrote:

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?

--

Dave Peterson