COUNTA Ignore Formulas

[sinspawn56]

Hello,
I am trying to write a COUNTA formula that excludes blank cells.
I searched this forum and found that

=SUMPRODUCT(--(A1:A100<>""))

does just that.

My question is what relevance does the "--" have?

[DonkeyOte]

It is the double unary operator and is used to coerce Booleans (True/False) to their integer equivalents (1/0 respectively)

You might find you can achieve the same results using :

=ROWS(A1:A100)-COUNTBLANK(A1:A100)

Or, alternatively if there's some consistency in the formula results...

Always Text: =COUNTIF(A1:A100,"?*")

Always Number: =COUNT(A1:A100)