Excel 2007 : CountIF or CountA

I have a spreadsheets with employee names in several different columns....first column is hard keyed with names, additional columns link to the preceding columns so if an employee gets added or deleted the future weeks will reflect the new names. I need a formula to count the employees names in each column excluding the blank rows that have link formulas in them referring to empty positions....the COUNTA formula is still counting the empty positions and the COUNTIF won't work at all for me.

Any ideas??

A sample might help - it's not clear what the "blanks" are showing (null or 0)

It might be the case that:

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will do what you want but that's very much a shot in the dark (obviously change <range> as appropriate)

Not sure I fully understand, but how about?

=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"?*") which should exclude formula null results. Adjust range to suit.