advanced countif?

**saybut** · 04-12-2005, 11:43 AM

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help.

I'm trying to do a slightly extended countif and don't know if it's possible.

I have two columns, one wih some report names in e.g.

Liquid Petrolium in France
France Liquid Petrolium
New Liquid Petrolium in France
Soft Drinks in Germany
Germany Soft Drinks

etc for a lot of countries and a lot of industries, in the next column I just have the industries on their own with no duplicates or anything. I need to do a countif but with the find function too so that excel counts the number of industries in the first column by matching just the part of the text from the second column.

Any ideas would be great.

Regards,

Mark P.

**Domenic** · 04-12-2005, 12:31 PM

It's not clear to me what you're looking for. Can you post a small sample of your data, including both columns, along with your expected results?

**SirSFZ** · 04-12-2005, 12:39 PM

are you trying to do a formula that in english does this...?

count if cell A* contains cell B*

i don't know how to do it, but i think this is what you are asking.

**saybut** · 04-13-2005, 07:26 AM

Thanks for the replys. sorry I only just recieved them now. If you still have time to look it would be great. I've attached a .jpg to my post.

As you can see on the pic, there are various occurences of the word "Logistics" in column A (this coulmn would usually be a lot longer with a lot of other terms titles in there covernig a lot of different industries and countries, as in the image they have varying names).

In column B, I have the text that I want to count from column A. So I want a count for the word Logistics, Machinery, Make-Up, managed Healthcare etc, but as you can see in Col A, I can't just do a striaght countif beacuse non of the terms match to the terms in Col b. So I'm trynig to do a countif but specify in it that when it looks through Col A, it counts all the occurences of the word even though it is not an exact match.

does that make any more sense?

thanks again.