Two things I would like to automate:

I need to add the total number of characters in up to 5 cells to know that
they do not exceed 75 characters total. Anyone know how I can do this?

Example: character count in cells B, D, F, H, J = total # of characters used

Also, I would like to just be able to click on a cell and see how many
characters are in that cell, or at least know that it is less than 285
characters.

These are easy to do in Word with the tool word count, is there anything
like it in Excel?