If these five individuals are assigned only against the 'place holder' cells
then you need to count only for cells containing these names...

Since you have only five names you can use Sumproduct like the one below;
=SUMPRODUCT(--(A1:A100={"Name A","Name B","Name C","Name D","Name E"}))
"PFB" wrote:

Excel 2007 / Vista
I have a scheduling worksheet showing individuals' names indicating in which
area they will work on each day of the month. A subgroup of workers has
their cumulative shifts assigned first to a "place holder name", and then
each of those shifts is assigned to one of five individuals in the subgroup.
As the individual assignments are made the cell changes color based on
conditional fomatting for each name. However, I need to keep a count of the
cells in each column that orriginally displayed the "place holder name". I
thought I would assign borders to those cells before changing them to the
individuals' names and then COUNTIF() the number of cells in each column that
had borders (unchanged), but I can't find any way to count the number of
cells in a range that have a particular border .