Try this:

=SUMPRODUCT((A1:A50="dog")*(B1:B50="brown"))

It might be more advantageous to assign cells to contain your criteria, so
that they can be more easily changed without having to revise the formula
itself.

Column A criteria in C1,
And Column B criteria in C2:

=SUMPRODUCT((A1:A50=C1)*(B1:B50=C2))

--
HTH,

RD

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"jsk" wrote in message
...
Could someone help me? I am inexperienced Excel user. I am trying to
create
a function that will look at two columns of data and tell me how many
occurances there are when column A equals a certain value when column B
equals a certain value. I.E., column A = dog and column B = brown.
Thank you.