counting occurrences of a text string in a column

Posted by Michelle on January 30, 2002 7:01 AM

Hi, I posted this question last night and it was there, but this morning it seems to have completely disappeared from the board.

I have a list of terms that I want to count the occurrences of in a column that contains variable text in each cell. For example, column A contains one occurrence of each term that I want to search for the occurrences of. Column B contains multiple terms separated by commas, of a variety of combinations of terms. I'd like to search the text in all of the cells in column B for the number of occurrences of specific text. I tried working with the countif function, but it's not working for me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Michelle

Posted by Juan Pablo G. on January 30, 2002 7:10 AM

Try with

=COUNTIF(B:B,"*"&A1&"*")

It the text in A1 appears more than once in a Cell, only counts it as 1.

Juan Pablo G.

Posted by Michelle on January 30, 2002 8:56 AM

Thank you!! I was close and was working with the wildcard, but I didn't have the syntax with the & listed correctly. I really appreciate it, you have just saved me a ton of time today!

Michelle