Excel stores its dates in numerical order from 31/12/1899 so waht you are
actually asking is for the number of dates between 39479 and 39507 (1/2/8
and 29/2/8)
so use =COUNTIF($A$1:$A$7,"39479")-COUNTIF(A1:A7,"39507") or put your two
dates in another cell and reference those.

Your Peter example should have worked, does your text have a leading space?,
You could get around it by asking for "*Peter*" but that would then find
Peter as a second name.

"Freshman" wrote:

Dear experts,

I've a worksheet with data in Column A to Column F. Column A is for dates
and column B is for names. I list some examples below:

12 Jan 08 Peter Ho Leung
22 Feb 08 Mary Kwan Yim
28 Mar 08 Peter Mung Ching
30 Apr 08 June Liew
3 Feb 08 June Tam Ho
13 Apr 08 Peter Lan Chi
26 May 08 Monica Cheung
27 Feb 08 Peter Cheng

Firstly, I want to count how many records in Feb 08. Secondly, I want to
count how many records with the name "Peter". I try to use the formulas below
but they don't work.

=COUNTIF(A1:A8,"*Feb*") and
=COUNTIF(B1:B8,"Peter*")

Please advise. Thanks in advance.