Countif issue

[pontiff]

Hello again it's been a while. Hope you can help once again.

I have a spreadsheet where each row holds grades data for a student.
Each student has 3 columns of grades ( not adjacent to each other.)

I want to countif column A, C, or E contains an A* grade ( a "starred A") as opposed to an A grade (without the *)

I cant persuade it to differentiate between "A*" and "A" . The grades were generated from a vlookup table.

Sorry if this is poorly described.

 

[VoG]

Try like this

=COUNTIF(A1:A3,"A~*")

 

[T. Valko]

Hello again it's been a while. Hope you can help once again.

I have a spreadsheet where each row holds grades data for a student.
Each student has 3 columns of grades ( not adjacent to each other.)

I want to countif column A, C, or E contains an A* grade ( a "starred A") as opposed to an A grade (without the *)

I cant persuade it to differentiate between "A*" and "A" . The grades were generated from a vlookup table.

Sorry if this is poorly described.

As long as the cells between the target cells don't contain any of the characters of interest...

=COUNTIF(A2:E2,"A~*")

Otherwise, you could string each cell test together like this:

=COUNTIF(A2,"A~*")+COUNTIF(C2,"A~*")+COUNTIF(E2,"A~*")

 

[pontiff]

Ahhh... thank you all once again! The little ~ , who would have thought. What exactly does it do? ( apart from solve my problem that is)

 

[VoG]

It makes Excel look for a literal * not a wildcard.

 

[T. Valko]

Ahhh... thank you all once again! The little ~ , who would have thought. What exactly does it do? ( apart from solve my problem that is)

The COUNTIF function supports the use of wildcards.

In this application the tilde character tells Excel to evaluate the asterisk as the literal asterisk character and not the asterisk wildcard character.

 

[pontiff]

Excellent! Thanks very much

 

[T. Valko]

Excellent! Thanks very much

You're welcome!