yes, at first i thought '$B$4' is a function as a whole but it turns out that it's only the dollar ($) sign, so nothing useful came up when i googled "what does $B$4 in excel mean?".
To solve this problem in Excel, usually I would just type in the literal row number of the cell above, e.g., if I'm typing in Cell A7, I would use the formula =A6. Then if I copied that formula to other cells, they would also use the row of the previous cell. Another option is to use Indirect(), which resolves the literal statement inside to be a formula. You could use something like ...
TWCN Tech News: How to count blank or empty cells in Excel and Google Sheets
If you want to count blank or empty cells in Excel and Google Sheets, here are the exact formulas you need to use. There are three ways to count blank or empty cells in any spreadsheet and here we ...
How to count blank or empty cells in Excel and Google Sheets
We will use the following three methods to count nonblank cells in Excel. In Microsoft Excel, the COUNTA is the function that is used to count the cells that contain some values. In simple words, the ...
MSN: Don't trust Excel's COUNTA function to count non-blank cells—here's a better method
In most counting scenarios in Excel, COUNTBLANK reliably counts blank cells, and COUNTA reliably counts populated cells. However, with these functions comes a problematic paradox: an empty string from ...