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Writing a Count Formula In Numbers

I want to count the number of times a word appears in one column, depending on a particular word in another column
i.e. how many times does CASH appear in ‘Payment’ column, when ‘January’ appears in the Month column.
I have tried using Countif & Countifs formulas but get an error message, so I’m obviously doing something wrong!
Regards
—–
Bruce

Comments: 2 Responses to “Writing a Count Formula In Numbers”

    6 years ago

    Using COUNTIFS is the right way to go. For instance:
    =COUNTIFS(A,"CASH",B",January")

    This will return the number of rows where "CASH" appears in column A and "January" appears in column B.

    One problem you may have is when you try to use words like "January" in a cell, Numbers will assume you want to indicate a date. So if you type January, you actually get the value 1/1/2018, the first day of that month in the current year. You can see this when you look at the bottom left corner of the Numbers window. The COUNTIFS function won't match the string "January" to the date "1/1/2018" because they are different things. So what you need to do is to use the right sidebar to change the cell to the type text instead of automatic.

    Bruce
    6 years ago

    Many thanks for the reply, I have now got the formula working after changing the month column to 'Text' instead of 'Automatic'. I would never have realised this without your help! Have a good day . .

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