The Countif formula

Definition

The Countif formula works very much the same as the sumif formula. It will count the amount of items you specify in its range. For example, if you want to count how many times the word “apple” exist, it will count it.

The makeup of the formula

The countif formula only has two fields

• The range is the first field; you can select any amount of cells or columns. Excel will search for the criteria in this range to count
• The next field is the criteria. If you want to count the word “apple”, you will specify it here. You can count the number 2 or 3, or any other number. Just put this in the criteria.

Example

If we have the following data in column A

We want to count the number of times the word "apples" occurs.

The formula to do this is the countif formula. (=countif(a:a,"apple")

Troubleshooting

The most common problems with the countif formula are as follows:

• Remember to make the criteria exactly the same as the items you are counting in the range. Check the spelling
• When you use this in other formulas, remember to close the brackets
• Make the range as big as possible, otherwise you will not count everything.

Things you can do with the countif formula

• Do reconciliations of thousands of lines in seconds...contact us for more info
• Number your data automatically...contact us for more info

<-----Back to index

Next topic----->