Using a pivot table in Google Sheets, which function should you use to total the number of non-empty sales records in the purchase_date column?

• A. CountA
• B. Sum
• C. Count
• D. CountIf

Answer: (A)

Counting non-empty records in a date column means tallying every row that has a date value. COUNTA counts all non-empty cells, regardless of the data type, so it will include dates as well as any other non-empty entries. This makes it the appropriate choice for figuring out how many records exist in the purchase_date column, since you’re interested in how many rows have a value, not the sum of those values. Using Sum would attempt to add dates, which doesn’t make sense for counting records. A simple Count would only count numeric entries and could miss non-numeric non-empty values. CountIf would require a specific condition, which isn’t needed here. So COUNTA best matches the goal of counting all non-empty entries in that column.