Parent and children row count

chloe.altenburg

Here is my formula:

=IF(COUNT(CHILDREN([Date of Review]@row )) > 0, COUNT(CHILDREN([Date of Review]@row )) + COUNT(PARENT([Date of Review]@row ), 1))

I want to count parent and children rows. Why is it not counting the parent rows with no children yet?

Can you help me improve my formula where in it also count parent rows with no children yet?

Thank you!

Isaac A.

Hi @chloe.altenburg!

Through some testing (and with the help of AI), I was able to confirm why your original formula wasn’t giving the expected results. The issue is that

COUNT(PARENT(...)) returns 0 on a parent row because there’s no parent above it, so your count was always coming up short by one.

If your goal is to always count both the parent and its children (and still return 1 when a parent has no children), you can simplify the formula to this:

=IF(COUNT(CHILDREN([Date of Review]@row )) > 0, COUNT(CHILDREN([Date of Review]@row )) + 1,1)

How it works:

• COUNT(CHILDREN(...)) counts all children that have values in the Date of Review column.
• +1 ensures the parent itself is always counted.
• If there are no children, the formula still returns 1 for the parent row.

Here’s what I saw in my test sheet:

• Parent with 3 children (all with dates) → 4
• Parent with 1 child (with a date) → 2
• Parent with no children → 1

Would this give you the result you’re looking for?

I hope this helps!

Cheers,
Isaac.