problem in my countif

does anyone know why this
=COUNTIF($A$10:$A$12,"*AF3*")

will only pick out one occurance of af3 in a cell even if that cell has 2 or more af3 in it eg

A
af3
af3
af3,af3,af3
af3

will give value of 4 not 6 ie it counts the 3 af3 in row 3 as only 1?

thank you

Yes countif only counts the number of cells that meet a criteria. the wildcards allow the text to be anywhere in the cell, but it will only be counted once per cell if it is true

if the following is entered as an array holding down shift and ctrl then hitting enter after you have typed it, and af3 is in cell b10

=SUM(LEN(A10:A12)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A10:A12,B10,"")))/len(b10)

that should work, let me know

Regards

Dav

works a treat thank you