COUNTIF - Avoiding duplicates

[MPunt]

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere. I have a spreadsheet where I have a series of COUNTIF columns at the end to count specific country exposures. I’m having a problem with similar namecountries, for example, ‘Niger’ will count every time someone records ‘Nigeria’. The same issue for Sudan and South Sudan.

Does anyone know how I can avoid this duplication?

 

[richh]

Try this:

=COUNTA(UNIQUE(A1:A6,FALSE,FALSE))

A1:A6 - should be the range of cells that contain the country names

 

[Fluff]

I’m having a problem with similar namecountries, for example, ‘Niger’ will count every time someone records ‘Nigeria’. The same issue for Sudan and South Sudan.

This sounds as though you are using wildcards in your countif, if that's the case just get rid of the wildcards.