Try this:

=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"*Va*")

Or, use a cell to hold the criteria:

C1 = Va

=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"*"&C1&"*")

If a cell might hold:

MD VA VA

And you need to count that as 2 then you'll need a different formula. Let us
know if that's the case.


--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"Rothman" wrote in message
...
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.