Countifs w/criteria equal to vlookup result

Hello and welcome to the forum.

I know that the issue is that excel is reading the formula, not the returned result

This is not how Excel works. Excel uses the result of the formula the same as if it were manually typed.

What's more likely is that the cells do not match exactly. Maybe there are leading or trailing spaces.

I recommend uploading a small representative sample of your data where you are experiencing the issue along with the desired results (which you can enter manually) based on that data.

To upload an Excel workbook, follow these steps:
1) Click on "Go Advanced"
2) Click on "Manage Attachments"
3) Click on "Choose File"
4) Choose your file and click on "Open"
5) Click on "Upload"
6) Click on "Close this window"

Thanks for the speedy replies! It's working now. I'm going to mark this as solved but does this happen to anyone else where you write a formula and it returns nothing until you close and reopen the xls, thereby causing all the calculations to rejigger? It happens ALL.THE.TIME to me. Arrays don't update, formulas return old results even though the dataset has changed, etc.?? What am I doing wrong?

Check that calculations are set to automatic and not manual.