How to count the number of shaded cells in Excel?

In Excel, we may shade cells with color to highlight important cells, and now you want to count the number of these shaded cells. How can you quickly solve this instead of manually counting them? Here this tutorial is introducing two tricks for you.

Count shaded cells with Define Name and formula

Quickly count shaded cells with COUNTSHADES function of Kutools for Excel

Count shaded cells with Define Name and formula

To count the number of all shaded cells, you need to define a name for the range (the range includes shaded color), then use some formulas in Excel.

1. Select a blank cell next to the data range, and right click to select Define Name form context menu. See screenshot:

Note: In Excel 2007, the context menu does not contain the Define Name item. But you can get it by clicking Formulas > Define Name.

2. In the popping dialog, define a name you like in the Name textbox, and type this formula =GET.CELL(38,Sheet1!A1) into Refer to box. See screenshot:

Tip: In the formula, Sheet1 is the sheet you work on, you can change it as need.

3. Then in the cell A22 (the cell has defined name), type this formula =Color (the name you defined at above step), then drag the fill handle to a range which is as the same scale as the original data range you want to count the shaded color. See screenshot:

Now you can see some cells are filled with zero, and some are filled numbers above zero, actually, the number of the cells with numbers above zero is the number of shaded cells.

4. In the blank cell, type this formula =COUNTIF(A22:K41,">"&0) to count the number of the cells with numbers above zero, then press Enter key. See screenshot:

Tip: In above formula, A22:K41 is the cell range with numbers.

Now 15 is the count of the shaded cells.

If you find this method for counting shaded cells a bit complex, you can proceed to the next method, which simplifies the process.

Quickly count shaded cells with COUNTSHADES function of Kutools for Excel

Here is a function called COUNTSHADES in the Kutools Functions group of Kutools for Excel which can quickly count the number of shaded cells with a bit of steps.

After free installing Kutools for Excel, you can use COUNTSHADES function by follow these steps:

1. Select a blank cell that you will output the result, and click Kutools > Kutools Functions > Statistical & Math > COUNTSHADES. See screenshot:

2. In the popping dialog, click to select the range you want to count shaded cells from. See screenshot:

3. Then you can see the number of shaded cells in the selected range has been displayed in the Function Arguments dialog, you can click OK to export the result to the cell you selected in step 1. See screenshot:

There are many useful functions in Kutools Functions, you can count number of each colored cells, or sum cells by one filled color or font color, or count the times of appearance of a specific character in a cell.