Interestingly, this doesn't account for the cut and paste error.
Other people here have run into similar problems. I do appreciate your
help.

Anyway, I am relieved to see that counta was not the correct choice,
even if that was not immediately obvious.


On Feb 2, 4:05 am, "David Biddulph" <groups [at] biddulph.org.uk
wrote:
Yes, what you are doing wrong is not understanding the function you are
using. I would have hoped that as "a fairly sophisticated computer user"
you might perhaps know how to use Excel's Help function to tell you what the
COUNTA function does, before starting to complain about "bugs". You may
perhaps have intended to use COUNTIF?
--
David Biddulph

"rguerrie" wrote in message

...

Excel is counting incorrectly, I think. I am using counta to count
the number of Xs in a column. If I enter counta(a1:a23,"x") it
evaluates to 1, which is incorrect. If I enter counta(a1:a23) it
evaluates to zero, which is correct. To verify this I search/find a1
to a23 for x, it says there aren't any. I also visually inspect the
column and there are no Xs. It does this in a number of columns.
It also miscounts 1 X as 2 Xs. When there is more than 1 X in a
column, it appears to count correctly.

My spreadsheets aren't that big, less than a MB each. This is not the
first problem I have encountered. When I copy then past special--
values only and transpose, it sticks in extra cells containing zeros.
I get a lot of buggy stuff like this. Why do I not see other people
complaining about things like this? I am a fairly sophisticated
computer user. Can anyone tell me if I am doing something wrong.