Learn how to count how many times a characters appears in a cell in Excel. br br Use this formula. br =LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"#","")) br br The formula =LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"#","")) calculates the number of times the # character appears in cell A2. First, LEN(A2) determines the total number of characters in A2. Then, SUBSTITUTE(A2,"#","") removes all # characters, and LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"#","")) calculates the length of the text without them. Subtracting this length from the original length (LEN(A2)) gives the count of # characters in the cell.