Formula to count blanks and specific characters

[jpkreider]

Good Morning,

I am terrible with formulas and was hoping to get some help. I'm trying to create a formula that counts
blanks as well as any cell that contains these characters ("O", "TR", "LD", "D"). I keep getting a too many arguments error. Is this even possible? Here is what I thought the formula should look like. Thanks for looking!!

=COUNTIF(C7:C17,"","O","TR","LD","D")

 

[Scott Huish]

=sum(countif(c7:c17,{"","o","tr","ld","d"}))

 

[Joe4]

Take a look at the documentation of the COUNTIF function. It only has two arguments.
COUNTIFS allows more conditions, but there must be a range explicitly listed for each condition (see: https://www.techonthenet.com/excel/formulas/countifs.php).
However, I don't think that is what you want either, as that will only count records if ALL conditions are not, not any single criteria.

See Scott's reply above for how to do it.

 

[jpkreider]

Thank you for your response. I really appreciate it. Sorry, but I understood this wrong. I need to count all cells that are blank and count all cells that have any characters except O, TR, LD, D. If the cell has any of these letters or letter combinations, I want to exclude them from the sum. I hope that makes sense and is probably a long shot, but worth a try. Thanks!

 

[Scott Huish]

=ROWS(C7:C17)-SUM(COUNTIF(C7:C17,{"","o","tr","ld","d"}))