vlookup with counting? does this need to be done with Arrays?

Hello,

Gotta say love this forum - i thought i understood excel formulae quite well until I came here

Basically, for the D&D campaign I DM, i've been creating and editing an excel based character sheet we use but the methods i used to track bonuses, items, etc was too cumbersome & took too much space. Now trying to find better ways to do it and running into lots of problems since it appears regular nested vlookups, hlookups, concatenates, counts, and Ifs just won't cut it.

In the inventory table for players, they could have a bunch of items. I'm trying to find specific "properties" on items but the property could be anywhere.

I found this here: =VLOOKUP("*"&A48&"*",Page3!$G$3:$R$121,1,FALSE))

while I know vlookup, i didn't know we could add wildcards. Now, this helped me partially but since vlookup only returns the first instance it finds, that still doesn't help.

I tried: =COUNTIF(Page3!$G$3:$R$45,VLOOKUP("*"&A49&"*",Page3!$G$3:$R$121,1,FALSE)) but that's totally wrong and this (from another forum): =SMALL(IF(Page3!$G$3:$R$121=$A$48,ROW(Page3!$G$3:$R$121)),ROW(1:1)) but i think this finds exact matches

The issue i have:

a player's character could have in table @ (Page3!$G$3:$R$121):

Ring of Wizardry I
Ring of Wizardry III
Amulet of Wizardry II
Wizardry I Plate Armour of Speed

since Wizardry is a property keyword and the roman numeric after it denotes it's benefit (and that # is the same benefit), if i could count the total instances of each type of Wizardry property the player has on his gear, i could then apply basic formulae (that i know!) to add whatever i need to add elsewhere.

My result from above should be:

Wizardry I = 2
Wizardry III = 1
Wizardry II = 1

Any ideas/thoughts? Am i even close/on the right track? I'm thinking I may need array formulae, but i really just don't get them. the solutions I see the problems here; many of the crazy formulae are like Latin or Sanskrit it appears

Regards,

Sanjay

yes exactly..thanks. the first solution seemed very simple. should have figured that out. the second also works ...so need to assess @ home and decide which to use...

Thanks both.

To get around this ibcoded sheet to use numerics instead of Roman numerals. Easier for players as well... Thanks guy s.

Sanjay