COUNTIFS using year as one criterion

[Sonnydl]

I've tried looking at all the prior threads, but nothing seemed to solve this the way I was hoping.

I've got two columns: A has full dates, and B has one of three events. I wanted to build a table that counts the number of events (in three columns), by years (in rows).

Yes, the simple way is to create another column and extract the year from the date [Year(A#)], then use COUNTIFS on Columns B & C, and truth be told I've already got my table, but I was looking to see if I could have done it using just the countifs, where one criterion finds the YEAR within the date in column A and the other finds the event in column B.

[daddylonglegs]

Your profile says Excel 2003, I assume you have a later version to use COUNTIFS.

You could use the start and end dates of the year, i.e. to count event1 in 2008

=COUNTIFS(A:A,">="&DATE(2008,1,1),A:A,"<"&DATE(2009,1,1),B:B,"event1")

or you can use SUMPRODUCT in any version

=SUMPRODUCT((YEAR(A$2:A$100)=2008)*(B$2:B$100="event1"))