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How to count the number of times a character / word appears in an Excel cell?

Author Xiaoyang Last modified

In this article, I will explain how to count the number of times a specific character or word appears in a cell within a worksheet. For instance, if a cell contains the text “Kutools for Outlook and Kutools for Word,” you can calculate how many times the letter “o” appears using simple formulas. Additionally, explore how the Kutools for Excel add-in simplifies this process with just a few clicks.

Count the number of times a character or word appears with formulas

Count the number of times a character or word appears with Kutools for Excel

Count the number of times a character or word appears with formulas

To count the number of occurrences of a word or a character in a cell, you can use the formula which combines SUBSTITUTE and LEN functions. Please do as follows:

Enter the below formula into a blank cell, and then press Enter key to get the number of times the character appears, see screenshot:

=(LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2, "remove","")))/LEN("remove")

A screenshot demonstrating how to count a word's occurrences in a cell using a formula in Excel

Notes:

1. In the above formula, A2 is the text cell that you want to count, the word “remove” is the specified character that you want to count its occurrences

2. With above formula, you can also count the number of a specific character appears in a cell, you just need to change the word "remove" to the character as you want, see the following screenshot:

=(LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2, "o","")))/LEN("o")

A screenshot showing a formula to count the occurrences of a specific character in a cell

3. This formula is case sensitive.

4. To count the number of times a specific word or character appears without case sensitivity, please apply the following formula:

=(LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A2),UPPER("remove"),"")))/LEN("remove")

A screenshot illustrating a case-insensitive formula to count occurrences of a word in a cell

Count the number of times a character or word appears with Kutools for Excel

If you have Kutools for Excel, you can use its Count the number of a word of Commonly-Used Formulas to count the times a certain character or a word occurs.

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1. Click a cell where you want to output the result.

2. Then click Kutools > Formula Helper > Statistical > Count the number of a word, see screenshot:

A screenshot of the Kutools for Excel 'Count the number of a word' option in Excel ribbon

3. And in the popped out Formulas Helper dialog box, select the cell that you want to cout the specifc word or character from the Text box, and then enter the word or character you want to count in the Word text box, see screenshot:

A screenshot of the Formulas Helper dialog box in Kutools for Excel for counting a word's occurrences

4. Then click OK to close the dialog, and you will get the correct result as you want.

A screenshot showing the result of counting a word's occurrences using Kutools

Note: This feature is case sensitive.

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