Count including Blank Cells

Thanks for the code Dave but I need to do this in a worksheet function rather than with code. Any suggestions?

Thanks for the suggestion Steve. However I need the function to work on the entire column and therefore do not know the range.
If I use

=COUNTBLANK(A:A)+COUNTA(A:A)

then it simply returns the count of the entire row.

Does anyone know a way to count the cells including blank cells with a worksheet function?

i.e.
Col A could contian numbers and text and blank spaces <blank>
Heading 1
Heading 2
<blank>
test 1
<blank>
result
3
4
5
<blank>
test 2
<blank>
result
6
7
8

=COUNTA(A:A)

returns 12 in either Excel 2000 or Excel 2007

=COUNTIF(A:A,"")

returns 4 in Excel 2000 but returns 65524 in Excel 2007 (in compatability mode)

I need a function that will return 16 for the example column A shown in both Excel 2000 and Excel 2007

In Excel 2000 I can use

=COUNTA(A:A)+COUNTIF(A:A,"")

But in Excel 2007 this same function gives 65536 (in compatability mode).

Thanks NBVC

The first formula worked perfectly in Excel 2000 and 2007
(I haven't tried it in 2003 yet).

The second formula worked in Excel 2007
(once I remembered it was an array formula and used Ctrl+Shift+Enter to confirm it).
However the second formula returned a #NUM error in Excel 2000.

But since the first formula is working for my purposes I'll go with that.

Thanks agian!

Excelent!

Thanks for the explination and correction to the formula for 2000 and 2003

One more issue I just came across.

If column A does not contain numbers in any of the cells then the formula does not work.
I know my example had numbers but there is a possibility that in use that column may contain only text.

Thanks