Measuring Text with LEN

How long is a piece of text? LEN (short for length) counts its characters:

=LEN(A2)

With spreadsheet in A2, the answer is 11. LEN takes text in and hands a number out, which means you can do math with the result, just like with SUM.

Here's the classic gotcha: spaces count. hi there is not 7 characters, it's 8, because the space between the words is a character like any other. So is punctuation. Every key press that produced a visible-or-invisible symbol gets counted.

Where does this matter? Anywhere text has size limits: usernames, tweet-length checks, product codes that must be exactly 12 characters. An empty cell measures 0, nothing there to count.