You're right, COUNTIF and SUMIF have such limited formula handling
ability that I just automatically turn to SUMPRODUCT, even though I
didn't need to in this instance.

Jerry

Chip Pearson wrote:

SUMIF does not support indirect range references.


I think it does support indirect range references. For example,
if E1 contains the text string A1:A6, the formula
=SUMIF(INDIRECT(E1),"a",B1:B6)
is the same as
=SUMIF(A1:A6,"a",B1:B6)