the "--" changes the logical true false of the equation in the parenthesis to
a numeric 1 or 0

the sumproduct will normally work in a situation like this.

are you sure your date is a date and not text?
for one of the date fields that shoud be April (b2) in an empty cell try
=month(B2)=4 (your example says "5" was this for a May question?)

if the answer is not "true" then it is not a date field and a different
matching equation needs to be used.
do something similar to the "customer error" column.
if there is a chance of leading or trailing spaces you might try trim(S2:S999)

"scott" wrote:

I want to return information per month.

Can I do something like this;

=IF(MONTH=APRIL,COUNTIF(B:B,"CUSTOMER ERROR"),)

Obviously MONTH=APRIL is not the proper language, but I am having trouble
using other date functions.

I want to return a number of how many times a customer caused the default in
an order per month.

This was reccomended earlier:
=SUMPRODUCT(--(S2:S999="CUSTOMER ERROR"),--(MONTH(B2:B999)=5))

Still didn't work. Maybe a dumb question, but what does the "--" mean?

Any help is appreciated.
Thanks so much
Scott