LEN

Return how many characters a piece of text contains.

Syntax

LEN(text)

Argument	Required	Description
`text`	Required	The text to measure.

Examples

Every example below was executed against VisiGrid engine 0.35.0 — not transcribed from another vendor's documentation. Reproduce any of them with vgrid calc.

Formula	Result	Notes
`=LEN("Spreadsheet")`	`11`
`=LEN(" Bo ")`	`4`	Spaces count, which is the whole reason this function is a diagnostic.
`=LEN(TRIM(" Bo "))`	`2`

Mostly used to find what you cannot see

LEN is rarely the answer to a question anyone asked. It is how you find out why two values that look identical refuse to match:

=LEN(A1)     → 4
=LEN(B1)     → 2

Both cells show Bo. One of them has padding. That is the single most common cause of a lookup returning #N/A on data that is obviously there — see why a VLOOKUP fails, and TRIM for the fix.

Characters, not bytes

An accented letter or an emoji counts as one. That matters when validating fixed-width fields against a system that counts bytes instead — the two will disagree on any non-ASCII input, and LEN is not the one that is wrong.

Excel compatibility

Matches Excel, counting characters rather than bytes.