no, no special characters, just numbers.

when I reduced the unique key to 13 characters it worked for both countif
and sumif... is there a limit to the length of the match criteria?

simon


"Dave Peterson" wrote:

If I put this in A1:A5,

simon*
simon2
simon3
simon4
simon5

And then this in A1:
=countif(a1:a5,a1)

I get 5.

Does your data contain wildcards (asterisk/question mark, */?)?

(If I understood the question???)

Simon Shaw wrote:

The concatenated column is 16 characters long, it appears to only be using 14
characters... is this possible?

"Simon Shaw" wrote:

Hi,

i have a column that joins a series of other columns to creat a unque key
for a table data I have in a sheet. when I then use sumif or countif against
the concatenated column it says there is more than one the same and the sumif
produces the same total for a number of lines. visually looking at the unique
key column, I can clearly see they are different.

ideas?

Simon Shaw

--

Dave Peterson