title: How can I count non adjacent blank cells in excel?
body: <p>I am working on a search function that searches a table in another worksheet that contains client information, from a cell using VLOOKUP. 
  I have 5 "search box" cells and want to be able to search by one criteria at a time, but only if the other 4 search Criteria boxes are empty. So if there was text in more than one of the search boxes at once it would return an error message. </p>
  
  <p>I achieved a desirable result in the first box using COUNTBLANK() like so: <code>COUNTBLANK(B5:B8)=4</code> nesting it in an IF statement in the formula bar</p>
  
  <p>My question is...How can I count the number of nonadjacent blank cells? So I can confirm that they are empty. </p>