COUNTIF not blank
In some of other Excel COUNTIF tutorials, you may come across formulas for counting non-blank cells in Excel similar to this one:
=COUNTIF(range,"*")
But the fact is, the above formula counts only cells containing any text values, meaning that cells with dates and numbers will be treated as blank cells and not included in the count!
If you need a universal COUNTIF formula for counting all non-blank cells in a specified range, here you go:
=COUNTIF(range,"<>"&"")
This formula works correctly with all value types – text, dates and numbers – as you can see in the screenshot below.