How To Use The Function Of LEN in Microsoft Excel

Using The Function Of LEN in Microsoft Excel

If you ever have wanted to try and find the number of characters that is in a line of text, you can make use of the Microsoft Excel to do so, all thanks to the LEN function. Here’s how you can use it.

What Is the LEN Function?

The LEN Function is a very simple calculation function that can count all the characters that are in a given text string, including special characters, letters, numbers, and spaces. The function name (LEN) is an abbreviation for length, as the function output makes provision of the total length of a text string as a number.

To give an example, let’s assume that an Excel workbook contains a cell with the following text below:

"This is an example of the text string that is containing 56 characters!"

The content of text string are the text, spaces, numbers, and a special character, and it has a length of 56 characters. If you should wish to confirm this calculation, you could make good use of LEN to do so.

How To Use The Function of LEN in Microsoft Excel

Unlike other functions that is in Excel, the LEN function is extremely very simple to use. It contains only just one argument—the text string that you want to calculate. You can either refer to a cell that contains the text string or you can place this in the formula directly.

For example, the following formula calculates the length of a text string that is contained in cell A1. If you wish to use this formula yourself, you can replace the cell reference with your own.

=LEN(A1)

Above is an example of an Excel formula using the LEN function, calculating the length of a text string.

As we have mentioned previously, you can also make use of the LEN to calculate the length of a text string that is written into the formula by directly using the example formula below.

=LEN("This is an example text string.")

An example of the LEN function that is in Excel, showing the length of a text string that is placed in the formula directly.

You can replace the example text with your own that is if you choose to, but you’ll need to surround the text string in quote marks. Alternatively, you can place the text in a separate cell (without quote marks), then you'll use the cell reference for that cell in your formula to help you determine the length instead.

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