In this example, you have the sales record for eight salespersons for the month of July. You can count highlighted cells in Excel by subtotaling the visible cells and applying a filter based on colors. Applying SUBTOTAL and filtering the data.In excel, you can count highlighted cells using the following workarounds: In this tutorial, you will learn how to count colored cells in Excel. But you can follow a few workarounds to count colored cells in Excel. You cannot count colored or highlighted cells with the COUNT function. The COUNT function in Excel counts cells containing numbers in Excel. How to Count Colored or Highlighted Cells in Excel