The solution for this problem is simple. The words are separated by spaces and these spaces need to be counted in order to find out how many words there are inside the text.

Worksheet formula to count words in a text

If we eliminate the spaces with the Substitute formula and count how many eliminations were operated then the result will be the number of words contained in that text, minus one. By extracting the length of the text obtained, after the replace of the spaces with blanks (“”),  from the length of the original text, then we get exactly the number of words inside the text. Except the words that are separated by “-” or other characters.

Don’t forget to add 1 to that result, since the last word is not followed by a space.