Calculating text values with owner ID numbers

[Merellia]

Hi everyone,

I'm stumped on tidying up a situation and am hoping for help. This is related to a research project of mine.

My database is tracking items owned by men and women. I used to enter the gender of an owner in Column C once per unique user, and then in Column D entered the user's gender for every item in the database. (See the pic below.)

Formerly what worked:

A. To count how many men or women were in the dataset, I used this formula: =COUNTIF(Descriptions!C2:C999,"M") [Where M and F identified male and female users.] This works because, even when a person owns multiple items, I only enter M once in the C column for the first item each person owns.

B. If I want to count how many items were owned by men, I used this formula: =(COUNTIF(Descriptions!D2:D999,"M")) (This works because the D column identifies the owner's gender for every item in the dataset.)

C. If I wanted to count how many times men or women use a particular subset of items, I use this formula: =SUMPRODUCT((Descriptions!D2:D999="M")*(Descriptions!T2:AD999="SUBSET_CHARACTERISTIC")) [Subset characteristics are always text values.]​

A colleague recommended I assign owners unique identification numbers in order to cut down on my use of two separate columns for gender, and said that if I did so I could delete the C column and use just the current D column in which every item is flagged with the owner's gender.

My challenge is that I can't figure out how to change the formulas. Here's what the Descriptions worksheet, columns A-D, looks like now that I've added User IDs:

I've figured out that I can now count the total number of people by counting unique IDs using this formula:
=SUM(--(FREQUENCY(Descriptions!B2:B999,Descriptions!B2:B999)>0))

But how do I revise the formulas I identified in A., B., and C., above? (Note that all of my calculations are happening on a different worksheet than the Descriptions worksheet, which is just for entering data.)

 

[Merellia]

I just realized that my question B is irrelevant because it counts the frequency of items by gender in column D (which will remain), and doesn't require counting by frequency of unique User ID#s.

Question A is still applicable. How, using the User ID column and the D column, can I how many unique user IDs are men, and how many women?

And then the revised Question C: How, using the User ID column and the D gender column, can I count the frequency with men, or women, own a subset of items? I would be updating the following formula, so I can delete the C (owner gender) column: =SUMPRODUCT((Descriptions!C2:C999="M")*(Descriptions!T2:AD999="SUBSET_CHARACTERISTIC"))

 

[Merellia]

For Question A: I just tracked down and adapted the following formula, which SEEMS to work--except it produces a fraction, and I'm not sure why. There are no fractional people in the database. Here it is: =SUMPRODUCT((D2:D999="M")/COUNTIF(B2:B999,B2:B999&"")) -- the results indicate that there are 131.5 men.