I'm certainly not an authority, but I'll take a guess. The
implementation of COUNTIF() parses the comparison argument as a string,
so

=COUNTIF(A10:A20,"=" & B1)

will interpret the concatenated string and attempt to deduce the
argument type from the context. When a comparison operator is left out,
"=" is implied, so just as

=COUNTIF(A10:A20,10)

is syntactically equivalent to

=COUNTIF(A10:A20,"=10")

So

=COUNTIF(A10:A20,"True")

is syntactically equivalent to

=COUNTIF(A10:A20,"=True")

Obviously, the function parser will preferentially interpret arguments
as numbers or booleans rather than strings, so the boolean will be
matched.

However, when you use a wildcard:

=COUNTIF(A10:A20,"TRUE*")

it forces the parser to interpret the argument as a string, and thus
match


In article ,
"Lookin for a job" wrote:

What's the difference between -

=Countif(A10:A20,"apples")

and

=Countif(A10:A20,"True")