COUNTIF not counting properly!! Character limit?

[kytihu]

I have a list of cells with text. I want to count how many times each unique text cell appears. However, countif is having trouble 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?? appeared in this range of two cells, it would tell me 2, although the correct answer is obviously 1. Is there a character limit for countif? Why is it missing this simply calculation?

[Ron Coderre]

If you are trying to match a literal question mark (which is a wildcard 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,
Ron

[kytihu]

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

Thanks!