In article ,
Pierre Leclerc wrote:

When you discover the SUMPRODUCT formula, you can forget about COUNTIF
and SUMIF.

Hard to imagine forgetting

=COUNTIF(A:A,"*a*")

in order to use something like

=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(SEARCH("a",$A$1:$A$65535)))

COUNTIF is *FAR* faster, can operate on entire columns/rows, and has the
advantage of being easily interpreted.

How would you replace

=COUNTIF(A:J,"Pierre")

using SUMPRODUCT()?

Also when you discover INDEX/MATCH you can replace VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP
and LOOKUP.

I disagree. Aside from the fact that VLOOKUP is somewhat more efficient
than INDEX/MATCH in most cases, VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP and LOOKUP usually have
the advantage of being more readable. That goes a long way toward
reducing errors in spreadsheets.