Counting and formulas with text strings

I am compiling the results of a survey and my cells are text. In the Gender column, I have Male and Female. I want a count of M's and F's. How do I get M to represent Male and F to represent Female. In another column I want to count the word struggles, and 3 other words. How do I do this? Thank you.

if your M's and F's are in A1:A100, try this (adjust your ranges to suit):

To get M's:
=COUNTIF($A$1:$A$100,"M")

To get F's:
=COUNTIF($A$1:$A$100,"F")


Of course, if "Male" or "Female" is in the cells, then use "Male" and "Female" in the formulas.

- Moo

if you are just wanting to count, as Moo assumes, then his suggestion is spot on. If on the other hand, you want to CHANGE the M's to Males and F's to Females, probably the easiest way would be to use find/replace ctrl H

a slight twist on Moo's formula would be something like this, which you could also modify/add to to find your other 3 words...

=COUNTIF($A$1:$A$100,"M")&" Males "&COUNTIF($A$1:$A$100,"F")&" Females"

Regarding the counting of 4 different words in a range, you could try something like this - again, adjust for your ranges:

=SUM(COUNTIF(C2:H25,{"struggles","word2","word3","word4"}))

That will total up the number of times those words appear in the range. If you want to total up each individual word separately, then you can use:

=COUNTIF(C2:H25,"word1")

- Moo

You also can use pivot table for that.