COUNTIF with Wildcard characters

I have a list of 14 digit long numbers (ex: 12345678912345) and I need to count the number of cells in the column that have specific 2 digit sequence in the 9th and 10th place irrespective of what is in positions 1-8 or 11-14. I have written the function as the following: =COUNTIF(A1:A7000, "=????????01????") and all that this returns is the number 0. I validated the function by trying it on a text string and it worked. Does the COUNTIF function with wildcard characters not work with numbers? Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer.

Example: How many of the following numbers have a 0 in the 9th position and a 1 in the 10th position (the underlined numbers contain the 01 sequence?)

12345678912345, 23456789012345, 34567890123456, 45678901234567, 56789012345678

Originally Posted by rfadams

Does the COUNTIF function with wildcard characters not work with numbers?

That's right, only with TEXT

You can try SUMPRODUCT like this

=SUMPRODUCT((MID(A1:A7000,9,2)="01")+0)