I have a worksheet with 4 columns: Name, Course, Year, Mode.
Column Year contains the year a student is studying on a course (Yr1, Yr2,
Yr3) and Mode contains Part-time or Full-time.

I can easily count the number of students on a given course by using
countif() on the Course column. But how can I count the number of students
on, say, Electronics, Yr2, Full-time? Is there a database or lookup
function that would do this directly for me? The only solution I can come
up with is to introduce an additional column that concatenates the columns I
am interested in and then use countif() on this column searching, for
example, for "ElectronicsYr2Full-time"