Day 62 · Sunday, 4 October 2026
From the archive
Count comma-separated labels on a support ticket, and flag the over-tagged ones
LEN doesn't count delimiters on its own, but the length of the whole string minus the length of that same string with every delimiter stripped out, plus one, reconstructs an item count without ever splitting the text apart.
Task:
You track triage for a software company's support desk. Each ticket carries a comma-separated list of labels in column B — some tickets have one label, others have four or more, and there's no fixed count to assume going in. In column C, work out how many labels each ticket has without splitting the text apart. In column D, use IF to flag any ticket with more than 2 labels as "Needs triage" rather than the default "OK" — that many labels usually means more than one team should be looking at it. Fill in rows 2 through 5.
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