How to check if a cell contains text in Excel

How can you check if a cell contains text in Excel? This is a common question we get from our readers. Most of the time, it's because someone wants to quickly calculate values that are within a range or if they want to count the number of characters, but today we're going to cover how you can check if there is any text in cells. In this tutorial, we will learn how to check if a cell contains text or not. This can be useful when you want to enter data into a cell or detect an empty cell before performing an operation with it.

Whether you’re working in a spreadsheet or on the go with your mobile device, it can be helpful to know whether a cell contains the text. This tutorial will show you how to check if a cell contains text using ISNUMBER, ISTEXT, and SEARCH functions in Excel.

Tips that are provided in this article are compatible with versions 2010/2013/2016.

How To Check If A Cell Contains Text In Excel- ISNUMBER Function?

You can check if a cell contains text using the ISNUMBER function. If you type:

=ISNUMBER(A1)

1. Put it into a cell; it will return TRUE if the value in A1 is numeric and FALSE if it's not. Let’s suppose we have a list, and we want to check whether there exists some text or not

2.From A1 to A4, we can see that there’s no number, so it has returned false,so you can confirm that there are some texts in those boxes

How To Check If A Cell Contains Text In Excel -ISTEXT Function?

The ISTEXT function returns TRUE if a cell contains text and FALSE if it doesn't

1. You can also use this method to check if a cell contains any text at all, the syntax of this function is :

=ISTEXT(cell)

2.Now, let’s use the previous example and apply this function.

3. Now, as you can see from above, it has returned true as an answer. 

Now you know how to check if a cell contains text in Excel using the ISTEXT function.

How To Check If A Cell Contains Text In Excel -ISBLANK Function?

The ISBLANK function is used to check whether a cell is blank. If the cell contains any data, it returns FALSE; otherwise, it returns TRUE.

Syntax:

ISBLANK(CellRef)

Here, CellRef is the reference to the cell that you want to check for blankness.

1. Let’s take the previous example and check whether it’s blank or not.

From here, you see that the cell isn’t blank so it has returned us false.

Now you know How to check if a cell contains text in Excel by using the ISBLANK function.

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