Asterisks are used as wildcard characters, so you were probably
counting everything if you used asterisks in your COUNTIF formula. Use
the tilde symbol ~ before the asterisk to tell Excel to treat it as a
normal character.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Jan 27, 1:35*pm, jimster wrote:
Bob Philips is wrong, *the COUNTIF() function counts the matching text in the
cell range including those in formulas.
I had a column with the same formula in each cell. *The cell returned blank
or "*". The countif() function gave 214 which was the number of cells
containing the formula! - there were only 46 asterisks displayed from the
formulas.