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How to count if cells are start with or end with specific text in Excel?

Author Sun Last modified

Supposing you have a range of data and you want to count the number of cells which start with “kte” or end with “kte” in a worksheet. Here I introduce some tricks instead of manual counting for you.

Countif cells start with or end with specific text with formula

Count and select cells start with or end with specific text with Select Specific Cells


Countif cells start with or end with specific text with formula

Here I tell you some formulas to count cells which start with or end with a specific text in a specified range.

Suppose you have a list of data as below screenshot shown:

a screenshot of the original data range

Select a cell which place the counting result, type this formula =COUNTIF($A$2:$A$10,"kte*"), then press Enter key to get the counting result.
a screenshot of using the COUNTIF function to count cells start with a specific text

Tip

1. If you want to count cells end with a specific text, for example, end with 123, then use the formula like this: =COUNTIF($A$2:$A$10,"*123"). The wildcard "*" indicates any characters or strings.

2. Above formulas can count cells that start or end with specified text easily in one range. however, if you need to count cells which stay in different ranges, you have to repeat applying the formulas for many times. In this case, let’s move to next method.


Count and select cells start with or end with specific text with Select Specific Cells

If you want to count and highlight the cells which start or end with a specific text, you can apply Kutools for Excel’s Select Specific Cells utility.

After free downlaod and installing Kutools for Excel, please do as below:

1. Select the data range and click Kutools > Select > Select Specific Cells. See screenshot:
a screenshot of enabling the Select Specific Cells feature of Kutools

2. In the popping dialog, select Cell in the Selection type section, select Begins with or Ends with as you need from the list of Specific type, and type kte in next text box. See screenshot:

a screenshot of setting the condition in the Select Specific Cells dialog box

3. Click Ok and a dialog pops out to remind you the counting result, and click OK to select these cells.

a screenshot showing how many cells are selected

Tip:

If you want to select and count cells which start with “k” and end with “e” simultaneously, you can do as below:

1. Select data range and enable Select Specific Cells dialog, check And option, and select Begins with in first list, and type k in next box, and select Ends with in second list, and type e in the box. See screenshot:

a screenshot of setting two conditions in the Select Specific Cells dialog box

2. Click Ok, and a dialog pops out to tell you the counting result and the cells are highlighted.

a screenshot showing how many cells are selected 2

Click here to know more about Select Specific Cells.


 
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