Count specific characters in a cell - Excel

Question

I would like to count all special characters (!%_*?+-,) in a cell.

For example:

With this formula =LEN(D2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(D2;\"!\";\"\")) i

Answer 1

Using formulas only, not VBA, this is possible with the following two approaches:

Consider the text in A1:

First approach:

Multiple nested SUBSTITUTE:

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,",",""),"-",""),"+",""),"?",""),"*",""),"_",""),"%",""),"!",""))

Second approach:

Using SUMPRDUKT for getting the MID function in array context to get each single charachter of the string in A1 compared with each single special character:

=SUMPRODUCT(--(MID(A1,ROW($1:$1000),1)={"!","%","_","*","?","+","-",","}))