Excel 2003: Count the Number of Times a Letter Appears in a Cell

I had tracked down the solution to this problem once before, and then couldn’t remember it or find it when I needed it again, so here it is.  It’s borrowed from another source, but I don’t mind, as long as it meets the need.

The question is, how do you count the number of times a letter occurs within a cell, in Microsoft Excel 2003?  I was searching for this:

count occurrences "of a letter in a cell" "excel 2003"

when what I should have been searching for was this:

“Count the times a specific character appears in a cell”

but probably not this:

"excel 2003" "Count the number of times a character appears in a cell"

Anyway, the solution is to use either of these:

=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"/",""))
=-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"/",""))+LEN(A1)

The former is simpler, and it works.

Registry Edit to Let Excel 2003 Read Quattro Files

After much screwing around with the Microsoft advice and reading of other postings, here are the contents of the REG file I created that now allows me to read old Quattro and Lotus (e.g., WKS, WK1, WQ1) files with Excel 2003, after getting an error message reading, "You are attempting to open a file that is blocked by your registry policy setting":

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Security\FileOpenBlock] "LotusandQuattroFiles"=dword:00000000 "LegacyBinaryFiles"=dword:00000000 "LegacyDatabaseAndDatasourceFiles"=dword:00000000 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Security\FileSaveBlock] "LotusandQuattroFiles"=dword:00000000 "LegacyBinaryFiles"=dword:00000000 "LegacyDatabaseAndDatasourceFiles"=dword:00000000

Note: in case it wraps oddly in your browser, each opening quotation mark begins a new line, as does each opening bracket. You also need the title line. To make it work, copy and paste those lines verbatim into a Notepad file. Save it in Unicode formatting to a file called "Enable Excel to Read Quattro Files.reg". Close it. Double-click on it and run it. Same basic instructions for another REG file I have here, which I have named "Enable Excel to Open Old Spreadsheets.reg". I didn't have to run it today, but I believe the updating of Office 2003 with Service Pack 3 (?) did require it previously:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\OICEExemptions] "ExemptDirectory"="E:\\Current\\Projects\\Computer and Data\\Old Data\\Old Spreadsheets"