Try something like this:

=SUMPRODUCT((ISNUMBER(SEARCH("France",C1:C100)))*( D1:D100=2004))

I've assumed column C contains countries and column D the year -
adjust to suit.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Jan 8, 11:10*am, Noha wrote:
hello everybody, I am using Excel 2003 and have a database of participants
(country, meeting, year, male or female), please help me in finding a
function that sums the number of times that a word (ex. France) appears in a
column "Country" during (ex. 2004) in column "year".

Thank you