Wonderful! This works exactly as I wanted.

Thank you very much, Mary-Lou.

"Bob Phillips" wrote:

=(LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"1234","")))/LEN("1234")

--
HTH

Bob

(there's no email, no snail mail, but somewhere should be gmail in my addy)

"MLK" wrote in message
...
Is there a way to count the occurences of multiple characters in a cell?
For example, the cell might contain: smith,john(1234), smith,mary(1234),
doe,john(2345), etc etc.

I would like to be able to count how many times (1234) appears in the
cell.
I tried using LEN, but that only counts one character.

Mary-Lou