Check If a Cell is Blank or Empty

The article demonstrates how to check if a range of cells is blank or empty by ISBLANK and other functions to recognize empty cells in Excel and take appropriate action based on their status.

There are several circumstances in which you need to determine if a cell is empty or not. If a cell is blank, for example, you may want to add, count, copy a value from another cell, or do nothing. ISBLANK is the appropriate function to employ in these situations, occasionally alone, but most often in conjunction with other Excel functions.

ISBLANK in Excel – a few points to keep in mind

The critical item to remember is that the ISBLANK function in Excel recognizes actually empty cells, that is, cells that contain nothing: no spaces, no tabs, no carriage returns, or anything else that looks blank in a view.

ISBLANK returns FALSE for a cell that seems to be blank but is not. If a cell includes any of the following, this behavior occurs:

=IF(A1>"", A1, "") //yields an empty string

check if a cell is blank 1

Imported zero-length string from an external database or as a consequence of a copy/paste operation.

Spaces, apostrophes, non-breaking spaces (&nbsp);, linefeeds, and other non-printing characters are permitted.

How to utilize the ISBLANK function in Excel

To obtain a better grasp of the ISBLANK function‘s capabilities, consider these practical applications.

If a cell is blank in Excel, then

Because Microsoft Excel does not have an IFBLANK function, you must use IF and ISBLANK to test a cell and execute an action if it is empty.

The general version is as follows:

=IF(ISBLANK(B1), "open", "completed")

check if a cell is blank 1

To demonstrate, let’s verify whether a cell in column B (delivery date) has any data. If the cell is empty, output “Open”; if it is not empty, produce “Completed”.

Please keep in mind that the ISBLANK function only returns cells that are completely blank. ISBLANK returns FALSE if a cell contains anything invisible to the human eye, such as a zero-length string.

If any cell in range is blank, then do something

There are many techniques to check a range of cells in Microsoft Excel for empty cells. We will use an IF statement to output one value if the range has at least one empty cell and another value if the range contains no empty cells. The logical test is performed by calculating the total number of empty cells in the range and then determining if the count is larger than zero. This may be accomplished via the use of the COUNTBLANK or COUNTIF functions.

Related Functions

  • Excel ISBLANK function
    The Excel ISBLANK function returns TRUE if the value is blank or null.The syntax of the ISBLANK function is as below:= ISBLANK (value)…
  • Excel IF function
    The Excel IF function perform a logical test to return one value if the condition is TRUE and return another value if the condition is FALSE. The IF function is a build-in function in Microsoft Excel and it is categorized as a Logical Function.The syntax of the IF function is as below:= IF (condition, [true_value], [false_value])….
  • Excel COUNTIF function
    The Excel COUNTIF function will count the number of cells in a range that meet a given criteria. This function can be used to count the different kinds of cells with number, date, text values, blank, non-blanks, or containing specific characters.etc.= COUNTIF (range, criteria)…
  • Excel COUNTBLANK function
    The Excel COUNTBLANK function use to count the number of empty cells in a range of cells. So you can use the COUNTBLANK function to get the number of blank cells in a given range in Excel.The syntax of the COUNTBLANK function is as below:= COUNTBLANK (range)…

How to Count Blank or Empty Cells in Excel

This post will guide you how to count blank or empty cells in a given range cells using a formula in Excel 2013/2016.How do I count the number of cells that are blank in Excel. You should know that excel offers several count functions to count the number of cells in a selected range of cells that match a criteria, such as: containing a specific text string or letter.

If you want to count the number of cells in a selected range that do not contain any data values, you can use the COUNTBLANK function.

Count Blank or Empty Cells


Assuming that you want to do a quick count of empty cells in a selected range(A1:A6).In this case, you can use a formula based on the COUNTBLANK function to obtain the empty cells.

=COUNTBLANK(A1:B6)

count blank empty cells 1

To use this above formula, you just need to type it on the formula space. And you also need to change the cells you need to obtain a count on in the above formula.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the number of cells that are blank from range A1:B6 is three in that case.

Now Let’s see how this formula works:

The COUNTIFBLANK function can be used to count the number of cells in a selected range that don’t contain any value. It means that cells that contain text, numbers, errors, etc. are not counted.

You can also use another function called COUNTIF function to achieve the same result of counting the number of cells that are blank in Excel. For example, using the following formula:

=COUNTIF(A1:B6,””)

count blank empty cells 2

From the above image, you would see that using the COUNTIF function to count the number of blank or empty cells in the range A1:B6 and return the same results as COUNTBLANK function.

  

Related Functions


  • Excel COUNTIF function
    The Excel COUNTIF function will count the number of cells in a range that meet a given criteria. This function can be used to count the different kinds of cells with number, date, text values, blank, non-blanks, or containing specific characters.etc.= COUNTIF (range, criteria)…
  • Excel COUNTBLANK function
    The Excel COUNTBLANK function use to count the number of empty cells in a range of cells. So you can use the COUNTBLANK function to get the number of blank cells in a given range in Excel.The syntax of the COUNTBLANK function is as below:= COUNTBLANK (range)…

 

Excel COUNTBLANK Function

This post will guide you how to use the COUNTBLANK function with syntax and examples in Microsoft excel.

Description

The Excel COUNTBLANK function use to count the number of empty cells in a range of cells. So you can use the COUNTBLANK function to get the number of blank cells in a given range in Excel.

This function will not count the cells that contain text, numbers, error.

The COUNTBLANK function is a build-in function in Microsoft Excel and it is categorized as a Statistical Function.

The COUNTBLANK function is available in Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010, Excel 2007, Excel 2003, Excel XP, Excel 2000, Excel 2011 for Mac.

Syntax

The syntax of the COUNTBLANK function is as below:

= COUNTBLANK (range)

Where the COUNTBLANK function argument is:

  • Range – This is a required argument.  The range from which you wish to count the empty cells.

Note:

  • If one formula that return empty text, and it can be considered blank cell and it will be counted by the COUNTBLANK function.
  • If cells contain zero and it will not be considered blank cell, so it will not be counted.

Excel COUNTBLANK Function Examples

The below examples will show you how to use Excel COUNTBLANK Function to return the number of blank cells in a supplied range of cells.

1# to count empty cells in a given range A1:B3, using the following formula:

=COUNTBLANK(A1:B3)

excel countblank examples1


Related Functions

  • Excel COUNT function
    The Excel COUNT function counts the number of cells that contain numbers, and counts numbers within the list of arguments. It returns a numeric value that indicate the number of cells that contain numbers in a range…
  • Excel COUNTA function
    The Excel COUNTA function counts the number of cells that are not empty in a range. The syntax of the COUNTA function is as below:= COUNTA(value1, [value2],…)…
  • Excel COUNTIF function
    The Excel COUNTIF function will count the number of cells in a range that meet a given criteria. This function can be used to count the different kinds of cells with number, date, text values, blank, non-blanks, or containing specific characters.etc.= COUNTIF (range, criteria)…