Try...

=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(MATCH(COLUMN(C1:N1)-COLUMN(C1)+1,{1,3,6,8,12},0)),
--(C1:N1=1))

or

=SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIF(INDIRECT({"C1","E1","H1","J1", "N1"}),"=1"))

Also, if your data contains whole numbers, try...

=INDEX(FREQUENCY((C1,E1,H1,J1,N1),0),2)

Hope this helps!

In article ,
MDW wrote:

I think I used to know how to do this, but I'm on a new version of Excel
(Xl2003) so maybe that wouldn't work anyway.

I want to perform a simple COUNTIF, except the cells I want the function to
examine are not contiguous. Essentially, I need the function to be something
like the following:

COUNTIF((C1,E1,H1,J1,N1),"=1")

However that, and other variations I've tried, don't seem to work. This has
got to be possible, but I think I need a pointer here. Thanks in advance.