How-To Geek on MSN

Don't trust Excel's COUNTA function to count non-blank cells—here's a better method

In most counting scenarios in Excel, COUNTBLANK reliably counts blank cells, and COUNTA reliably counts populated cells.
How-To Geek on MSN

The simple Excel function that decides if your formula spills or returns one value

If you decide to spill the results, you can then use the spilled range operator (#) to perform a calculation on the spilled range. Simply reference the first cell of the spilled range with a # ...