Hi,

I'm hoping someone may be able to help.

I'm trying to count the number of times a text phrase appears within a column in another table, but where all words in the phrase can appear in any order.

For example:

A column in table 1 contains the words:

chocolate and strawberry ice cream with waffers
white chocolate ice cream cone
dark chocolate ice cream cone

A column in table two contains the phrases:

ice cream
strawberry cream
ice cream with chocolate

I would like to count the number of times each phrase appears in table 1. The count needs to include all words from the phrase but they can be looked up in any order. So 'ice cream' would = 3, 'strawberry cream' would = 1, and 'ice cream with chocolate' would = 1.

So far I've tried splitting each phrase with the '*' wildcard and then combined with:

=COUNTIF(Sheet1!$A$2:$A$4,"*"&B2&"*")

Where A2:A4 being Table 1, cell B2 being the first phrase in Table 2 I want to count the occurrence of.

Hope I've explained that relatively clearly, I've been banging my head against a wall and would really appreciate some help on this!

Thanks guys,
Dan