VLookup

  

COUNTIF

COUNTIF is good for vacation/business trip planning because it counts any number of the same thing.

Say, there is a spreadsheet showing a yearly or monthly calendar where you input letters for every person going on vacation (to avoid everybody disappearing at once). Unfortunately there are only a limited number of holidays one can take, so an extra cell might calculate the number of times you input a V, then Mrs./Mr. V knows that her/his vacation planning has come to an end when that number hits the limit.

Another idea could be to count the number of times something reaches more than 100 per cent. With COUNTIF you can count all those cells that show more than 100 per cent - then you might know how many categories of whatever have reached more than planned (you won't know which categories - see IF,AND,OR for that question).

  

The COUNTIF function has 2 arguments:
COUNTIF(search in this area;how many of these you can find there)
 
=COUNTIF(A1:C20;"V") Look for the letter V in all cells between A1 and C20, then write down the number V's you can find.
=COUNTIF(A20:F200;">1") Look in the area between A20 and F200 and note how many times you find a number > than 1 (which could be 100% in this case)

No matter whether COUNTIF looks for letters, words or numbers - the second argument (what countif is supposed to look for) is always put in quotes.

 
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