Silly question about using dates

I have a multi-page worksheet, sorted out by date and type of work done. I am
looking for a reasonable way to COUNT all the entries in certain months.
Every function i try errors out. And combining MONTH with COUNTIF does not
seem to work. i do not want to SUM them, just to COUNT them.

Don't discount the sum functions for counting

=SUMPRODUCT(--(MONTH(A1:A5)=2))

will count all of the dates in A1:A5 that are February (ie equal to 2).

You could also use the regular sum function, but it would have to comitted
w/Control+Shift+Enter

=SUM(--(MONTH(A1:A5)=2))



"Zerosumgame" wrote:

> I have a multi-page worksheet, sorted out by date and type of work done. I am
> looking for a reasonable way to COUNT all the entries in certain months.
> Every function i try errors out. And combining MONTH with COUNTIF does not
> seem to work. i do not want to SUM them, just to COUNT them.

I should add that it seems named ranges do not work in the MONTH command. Am
I wrong on that or just doing it wrong?

"Zerosumgame" wrote:

> I have a multi-page worksheet, sorted out by date and type of work done. I am
> looking for a reasonable way to COUNT all the entries in certain months.
> Every function i try errors out. And combining MONTH with COUNTIF does not
> seem to work. i do not want to SUM them, just to COUNT them.

Let me take a wild guess: Try COUNTA(X?:X?)

See if that works. Replacethe X and ? by your own reference

Gilles
"Zerosumgame" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>I have a multi-page worksheet, sorted out by date and type of work done. I
>am
> looking for a reasonable way to COUNT all the entries in certain months.
> Every function i try errors out. And combining MONTH with COUNTIF does not
> seem to work. i do not want to SUM them, just to COUNT them.

There's no reason that you can't use named ranges like

=SUMPRODUCT(--(MONTH(daterange)=2))

.....but you might need to be careful with this formula when counting January, empty cells will be counted also, so use

=SUMPRODUCT(--(MONTH(daterange)=1),--ISNUMBER(daterange))

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 16:33:01 -0800, Zerosumgame
<[email protected]> wrote:

>I have a multi-page worksheet, sorted out by date and type of work done. I am
>looking for a reasonable way to COUNT all the entries in certain months.
>Every function i try errors out. And combining MONTH with COUNTIF does not
>seem to work. i do not want to SUM them, just to COUNT them.


=COUNTIF(rng,">="&DATE(2006,1,1)) - COUNTIF(rng,">"&DATE(2006,1,31)

will give you the count for the month of January 2006

Perhaps you can adapt this to your issue?

If you want the count for ALL january's , then SUMPRODUCT will work.
--ron