I tried the cell-view but it showed the cell as blank, but counta would count
it anyway. This was data that I copied from an access table. But when I did
a find and replace and choose find all with nothing in the find it found all
the cells that were suppose to be blank. I then did the ctrl A and it
selected them. I then closed the find and replace then did a delete. Then
the counta worked. I don't know what access is putting in those blank cells,
but excel doesn't show anything but the counta doesn't see them as blank.
Maybe if someone from MS checkes these fourms they could have an answer. I'm
running office 2002 sp2

"CLR" wrote:

When I do importing of data, I usually find that I must "clean" the data.
That is, get rid of undesirable and unseen characters. Cell-View will tell
me what is in the cells, and Edit Replace will convert them to
"nothing".....or "ASAP Utilities" has a feature that will help.

hth
Vaya con Dios,
Chuck, CABGx3


"JackieD" wrote in message
...
Here's what I'm attempting to do: For each column, X,Y, Z, I am
attempting
to count nonblanks. However, the data was imported from Access and
Oracle,
and Excel treats what appear to be blank cells as nonblanks. I've tested
this theory by highlighting a couple of "blank" cells and deleting them,
and
my count changes. So, can I get Excel to put a value into my "blank"
cells,
so then I could filter it out, or create a formula that would only count
dates in my columns (which is what I'm after).

This is what I'm looking at:

A B C
1 2/4/2006 2/6/2006 ("blank")
2 ("blank") 12/13/2005 1/7/2006
3 2/20/2006 1/15/2006 ("blank")

In each column if I use a COUNTA I'll get a total of 3, instead of 2 for
A,
3 for B and 1 for C. Any ideas?