Oh, I get it! Sometimes I'm pretty dense!

When using a cell to hold the criteria:

AA1 = 10

=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"="&AA1) = greater than or equal to AA1
=COUNTIF(A1:A10,""&AA1) = greater than AA1
=COUNTIF(A1:A10,AA1) = equals AA1
=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"<"&AA1) = is not equal to AA1
=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"<="&AA1) = less than or equal to AA1
=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"<"&AA1) = less than AA1

--
Biff
Microsoft Excel MVP


"mwam423" wrote in message
...

hi biff, thanks for the reply! fyi, for COUNTIF, and later SUMPRODUCT, i
was using cell reference rather than something explicit, in quotes, for
the
criteria and i'm thinking that's part of the problem.

hope this makes some sense: in the range (a1:a10) i have a menu generated
list which may have zero, one, or multiple entries. the criteria is each
cell in a 50+ column X 200+ row grid and i just wanted a 1 to result if a
cell in the gird matches any of the choices macro user selected from a
menu.
the value 1 is more like a marker that helps macro figure which columns
and
rows to print (utilizing autofilter).

as a result i'm using IF(ISNA(MATCH(a1:a10, mycell, 0)),0,1) because MATCH
seems to work well with labels, which is what all the data is/will be
formatted in.