Have you ever got into situation in office where you need to count the cells in Excel sheet with specific color? If yes then you can use following code which counts the number of cells with specific color (here it is yellow) and put the count in cell

How to Count Colored Cells in Excel

It is worth to mention that the above code does not count the cells where colors are coming through conditional formatting. You can use DisplayFormat.Interior.Color to get the conditional formatting colors (DisplayFormat.Interior.Color works only on Excel 2010 or above) or read this post

Count Colored Cells in Excel
Public Function CountColorCells(rng As Range) As Long
    'Variable declaration
    Dim lColorCounter As Long
    Dim rngCell As Range
    'loop throught each cell in the range
    For Each rngCell In rng
        'Checking Yellor color
        If Cells(rngCell.Row, rngCell.Column).Interior.Color = RGB(255, 255, 0) Then
            lColorCounter = lColorCounter + 1
        End If
    Next
    'Return the value
    CountColorCells = lColorCounter
End Function

To use this code in your Excel file, follow below steps:

  1. Open the Excel file where you want to count the color cells
  2. Press Alt+F11
  3. Insert a Module (Insert>Module) from menu bar
  4. Paste the code in the module
  5. Now type the formula in the cell where you want to get the count
  6. =CountColorCells(A2:A11)
  7. Done

Here I have counted the cells with yellow color. You can change RGB (#,#,#) code to count other colors. You can find RGB codes of any color using following steps

  • Select the cell which contain the color you want to count
Excel Count Color Cells
  • Right click and select ‘Format Cells…
count color cells in excel
  • In the Format Cells dialog box go to ‘Fill’ tab and click on ‘More Colors…
Get RGB Color in Excel

That’s all, in the ‘Color’ dialog box, you can view the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) codes of the color

RGB Color Excel

If you are look for a code to sum the cells based on it’s color then you can read this post.

How to Count Colored Cells in Excel

In this tutorial, I will show you three ways to count colored cells in Excel (with and without VBA):

  1. Using Filter and SUBTOTAL function
  2. Using GET.CELL function
  3. Using a Custom Function created using VBA

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2 Comments

  1. H HALLEBEEK says:

    It doesn’t work with conditional formatting because the cell color does not really change

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