DCOUNTA

What it does

DCOUNTA(database, field, criteria)

DCOUNTA(database, field, criteria) selects the records of database that satisfy criteria and returns how many of them have a non-blank cell in the column named by field.

With R the set of selected record rows and c the resolved field column:

result = | { r in R : cell (r, c) is not blank } |

Numbers, text, and logicals all count as present. Only genuinely absent content — an empty cell, or an omitted value — is excluded.

If field is omitted, the column stage disappears and the function returns |R|, the count of matching records. In that mode DCOUNTA and DCOUNT return the same thing.

The selection stage — header matching, AND across a criteria row, OR down the rows, blank criteria cells, and criteria-expression parsing — is identical for all twelve database functions and is explained once in the criteria-range mechanism.

Arguments

Three argument slots; the reference implementation declares an arity of exactly 3.

• database — the header-plus-records range or array.
• criteria — the header-plus-conditions range or array.

Try it

Quirks

Result and edge cases

Returns a Number — a count, so always a non-negative integer.

• No record matches: 0. No error on an empty selection.
• Field omitted: the count of matching records.
• Text in the field column counts, including text that reads as a number. This is the cleanest way to see the difference from DCOUNT: on a column of "1", "2", "3", DCOUNTA counts three and DCOUNT counts none.
• Logicals count.
• Arrays: inline array literals resolve to grids and are accepted; DCOUNTA is not a lift kernel.

Errors

How to implement

Notes for implementers

1. "Non-blank" is a value-kind test with one uncomfortable edge. Empty and the Missing marker are blank; every other core value kind — Number, Text, Logical — is present. Whether zero-length text belongs on the blank side is the one genuinely contested cell of that table, and it is unresolved here.
2. Two code paths, one function. The omitted-field mode returns before any column is read, so a bad field value is undiagnosable in that mode. Resolve the field only when supplied.
3. Errors are not "present". A scanned error surfaces instead of incrementing the count, which is a different decision from "count it as non-blank" and is easy to get wrong when the counting predicate is written as !is_blank(cell).
4. Numeric criteria comparison is not exact double comparison — see the note in the shared mechanism.

Rust code

3 dcounta "DCOUNTA" (3, 3) [R "database", V "field", R "criteria"] |s, a, sv| { database(s, a, sv, Kind::CountA) }

No implementation has been published with a Handbook test suite for this function.

Version differences

No comparison between specific Excel builds is recorded here yet. This does not establish that all builds behave alike.

Alternatives

Relationships

• DCOUNT is the number-counting sibling. The pair mirrors COUNT and COUNTA. These two are the only family members that accept an omitted field.
• Nearest modern equivalent: COUNTIFS with a "<>" condition on the field column, which expresses "non-blank and matching" inline instead of through a criteria table.
• Confused with: COUNTA (no selection stage), COUNTBLANK (the complement, and with a different treatment of ""), and DCOUNT.

Named variants

No named variants are recorded yet.