hi
=countif(A1:A50,"*VA*")

use the wildcard * in the search. adjust range to suit.

Regards
FSt1

"Rothman" wrote:

I have a column of state abbreviations and am simply trying to count how many
times each state appears in the column.

Unfortunately, there are some cells in the column that contain two or more
states. Countif doesn't like that (i.e if VA is in one cell and "MD VA NY"
is in another, it doesn't count VA twice).

What do I do? This isn't the only data in my sheet, so adding columns would
be...messy.