How do I sum characters (like all "A's") in a colu

[MariaKU]

I know this is a basic question. Could you tell me how to use the sum function to add up how many of the letter A appear in a column. Example colum A reads: cell A1 is "A", cell A2 is "C", cell A3 is "D", and so forth. I need to sum each apprearing character (A-D for my spreadsheet) for each of 125 columns, quickly.

 

[Iridium]

Look at the help file on COUNTIF

 

[MariaKU]

ok, I'm thick

Could you give me the formula exactly, cause I've been playing w/ it for a while now? Thank you.

 

[Iridium]

No you're not thick - you just don't know yet.

Anyway the only way I know is to have a formula for each in four separate cells:

=COUNTIF(B3:B16,"A")
=COUNTIF(B3:B16,"B")

etc etc

HTH

 

[MsT]

A way to make it slightly less work is to use a cell reference in the countif formula. So, for example, if you were trying to count the appearances of your letters in cells A1:A10, you could list your four values (A,B,C,D) in a column (say, d1,d2,d3,d4.) In cell e1 put the formula =countif($a$1:$a$10,d1). This will count the A's, as d1 has an A in it. Use fill down and the four totals will appear. Probably not worth the effort for counting four items, but definitely a time saver if you wanted to count a lot of different things!

The other approach is to use a pivot table - use the wizard, it's really easy, let's say that your column of letters had the heading 'Letters', put 'count of letters' as the data in your pivot table and 'letters' as the column heading.

Are you in education? I use this all the time to count up grade totals!

 

[MariaKU]

Thanks

Thank you, it worked out well.

 

[Ash Brook Commercial Prop]

Hi,

I have a spreadsheet which consist of both numbers and letters. The letters are "N" (north) "S" (south) "E" (east) "W" (west). I want my spreadsheet to be able to autosum the letters fro example all the "N" in my spreadsheet which are placed in different cells should be able to give me a number of how many "N" there are and the same with the other letters. Is there some way to calculate this?

Thank You....

 

[teitei papa]

can you please help with this? if i have column a1 to a10 with letters as values, and i wanna have the total of these on colummn a12. how will make the formula?


a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
i
j


10

 

[T. Valko]

Maybe this...

=COUNTA(A1:A10)

 

[teitei papa]

can you please send me the answer to this email? i really do need this.