counting the number of instances of blank cells in a range

HI,

First I'm not sure if this is possible with formulas and may need to be done using VBA but here goes.

What I need excel to do is count the number of times there is a gap/instance of blank cells in a column of data - NOT to just count the number of blank cells.

Say the data was as follows:

Row a 112
Row b 4861
Row c 41861
Row d
Row e
Row f 4865
Row g 99
Row h
Row i 66636
Row j
Row k 4156146
Row l 786176
Row m 617917
Row n
Row o
Row p
Row q
Row r 861768

In that range there would be 4 gaps between the cells with data in them. Is it possible to count this? The data I have has thousands of rows so this would take forever counting manually.

Thanks in advance!

Try

=COUNTIFS(C2:C18,"",C1:C17,"<>")

Notice the offset of 1 row between the 2 ranges, this was intentional.

Thanks melvinrobb, worked a treat