Much better than doing it manually

Counting characters in an Excel cell is a lot easier than you might think. With a few simple formulas, you can count the number of characters in a single cell or multiple cells and get a total of specific characters.

If you want to export your data and you want to limit the number of characters per cell or know how many times a certain character occurs, here's how to do it in Microsoft Excel.

To get the total number of characters in a cell, use Excel's LEN function. The syntax for the formula is simply LEN(cell), where you enter a cell reference for the argument.