Larry of Oz
New Member
- Joined
- Jun 2, 2020
- Messages
- 15
- Office Version
- 2016
- Platform
- Windows
Hello all,
I'm trying to develop my understanding of Excel a bit, and am working on a spreadsheet where I'd like to count text entries contained in three consecutive columns. All text entries in these colums are selected from defined dropdown lists. I originally thought I could use COUNTIF, so tried the following (as an example), which always returned 0 no matter how many times "Future Ready" appeared as an entry.
=COUNTIF(A3:C20,"Future Ready")
After a bit of messing around and Googling I tried combining the COUNTIF with SUM in an array formula like the image below, and it worked perfectly. So with regards to counting text entries in dropdown lists, I can't find any information about why it works this way but not using COUNTIF on it's own. Is anyone able to shed some light on this for me so I know how it works, or in fact, if there's a better way to go about this with regards to dropdown lists?
Thanks so much in advance.
Lauren
I'm trying to develop my understanding of Excel a bit, and am working on a spreadsheet where I'd like to count text entries contained in three consecutive columns. All text entries in these colums are selected from defined dropdown lists. I originally thought I could use COUNTIF, so tried the following (as an example), which always returned 0 no matter how many times "Future Ready" appeared as an entry.
=COUNTIF(A3:C20,"Future Ready")
After a bit of messing around and Googling I tried combining the COUNTIF with SUM in an array formula like the image below, and it worked perfectly. So with regards to counting text entries in dropdown lists, I can't find any information about why it works this way but not using COUNTIF on it's own. Is anyone able to shed some light on this for me so I know how it works, or in fact, if there's a better way to go about this with regards to dropdown lists?
Thanks so much in advance.
Lauren