Trust me on this!

It would be easier to denote an absence with an "A" and then count the As as
opposed to counting RED cells.

=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"A")

Biff

"sunshine19992" wrote in message
...
For example, IF the cell $C$9 has a background color of RED then I want to
display 1 in this cell ($D$9). Once this is completed I am tallying up
everything in column D to find out how many times that happened.

(FTI - reason for this is that RED shows an absence and we need to
calculate
how many absenses)