Try...

=COUNTIF($A$2:$A$4,SUBSTITUTE(A2,"*","~*"))

Hope this helps!

In article .com,
wrote:

Dear all,

after having searched this group and google-ed and beating my own
brains, I still can't find a (elegant) solution to this small but
rather annoying issue....some help would be appreciated....even when I
am overlooking the obvious.....
Here it is: using COUNTIF to find number of occurrences of a value in a
range in which the value can contain a star operator ( * ).
Example: countif gives this
Column A Column B = Countif($A$4,A2)
FT1305 1
FT1305* 3
FT1305* 3

While I am looking for:
Column A Column B = Function(?????)
FT1305 1
FT1305* 2
FT1305* 2

Any ideas?

Thanks on behforehand,

regards,

Elly