COUNTIF not counting properly!! Character limit?

[kytihu]

I have a list of cells with text. I want to count how many times eac
unique text cell appears. However, countif is having troubl
accurately distinguishing between unique cells

Ex:
ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN??
ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VANIL

If I were to ask it how many times ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN?? appeare
in this range of two cells, it would tell me 2, although the correc
answer is obviously 1. Is there a character limit for countif? Why i
it missing this simply calculation

 

[Ron Coderre]

If you are trying to match a literal question mark (which is a wildcar
for any single character) you need to prepend a tilde (~) to it.

=COUNTIF(E7:E8,"ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN~?~?")

Otherwise, without the tildes,
=COUNTIF(E7:E8,"ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN??")
will match on ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN followed by any 2 characters.


Does that help?

Regards,
Ro

 

[kytihu]

That's exactly it. It was reading the ?? as "any 2 letters" i guess.

Thanks