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How to count line breaks in a cell in Excel?

Author Sun Last modified

If the contents are too long to fit within a cell, we often use line breaks so that the contents can be fully displayed within the cell, as shown in the screenshot below. Have you ever tried to count the number of line breaks in a cell?
A screenshot showing cell contents with line breaks in Excel

Count line breaks in a cell with formula

Count line breaks in a cell with VBA

Count line breaks in cell with formula

To count line breaks in a cell, you can try this formula.

Select a cell next to the string you want to count line breaks, type =LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(10),"")), and press Enter key. See screenshot:
A screenshot of the Excel formula used to count line breaks in a cell

Note:

1. If you work with Mac system, try this formula =LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(13),""))

2. Above formulas only count manual line breaks.

Count line breaks in cell with VBA

Here is VBA code that can also count the line breaks in a cell in Excel.

1. Press Alt + F11 keys to enable Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications window.

2. Click Insert > Module, copy and paste code to the Module.

VBA: Count manual line break

Public Sub CountLines()
'UpdatebyExtendoffice20171222
    Dim xStrLen As Double
    Dim xChrLen As Double
    With Range("A2")
        xStrLen = Len(.Text)
        xChrLen = Len(Replace(.Text, Chr(10), ""))
    End With
    MsgBox "There are " & xStrLen - xChrLen & " line breaks"
End

A screenshot of the VBA code module

3. Press F5 key, a dialog pops out to tell you the number of line breaks.
A screenshot of the Excel VBA result dialog displaying the count of line breaks

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