How to count characters and words in Excel

Text Toolkit will help you count the number of words and characters in your Excel worksheet. The Count Characters tool lets you quickly find out the number of all or specific chars and words in the selection. You can get the result as either values or ready-made formulas.

Before you start

We care about your data. Always choose to Back up the worksheet so that original table remained intact.

How to get chars and word count in Excel

Find the utility in the Calculate group on the Ablebits Tools tab in Excel. Just click the Count Characters icon and choose to count chars or words:
Run the add-in from the Excel's ribbon.

The add-in offers you the following options:
The Count Characters options.

  1. This field lets you specify the needed range of cells.
    Note. Whether you select the entire table or a few columns, only the leftmost column of the highlighted range will be processed.

    To change the range, select the cells with values you'd like to count in your Excel worksheet or enter a different range in the field manually.

  2. Click the Expand selection icon to highlight the current column.
  3. Pick the Count characters option if you want to see how many symbols each cell contains.
  4. Select to Count the following characters and enter the value of interest to see how many times it occurs in the highlighted range. Opt for Case-sensitive to perform case-sensitive search.
  5. Choose the Count words option to find out the number of words within the cells you select.
  6. Tick off the Insert as formula checkbox to paste the results as the LEN function and recalculate them if the source data changes.
  7. Have the add-in Back up the worksheet. We recommend keeping this option checked since Excel doesn't let you cancel changes made by add-ins.

Click Insert Results and get a new column with the counted results to the right of the source column.