countif with any cell containing a certain word

Is it possible using countif to count all cells that contain a '*', even though other data might be contained within the same cells

i.e. there may be other words or data in the cell aswell but for this purpose '*' denotes a new customer and therefore want to count all these up wherever they appear in the specified data range of D18:D62

If i use just the normal countif function to simply find only cells in that range that only contain the character '*' i'm currently finding that it returns a value of 45 when it should at the minute be 0, I guess this is because in computer terms it denotes 'count all',

does anyone know if it is possible to only count this character?

Sure - use:

=COUNTIF(A1:C10,"*~**")

and adjust the range to suit.

Hope this helps!

Richard

Fantastic, works perfectly.

Thank you