On Jan 27, 3:50*pm, Rae wrote:
what I am trying to do is calculate the number of people
I have on duty. *This is on a schedule showing vacation,
sick, holiday, ect. *So before I make my assignments, I
want to know how many bodies I have available to assign
to a position. *When the cell is empty, it should count
as 1 body, if I have put V, H, S or something in the cell,
I want it to take away from the total available to me.

I wonder if you would be happier with a different approach altogether.

Let's go back to your first sentence: you want to calculate the
number of people you can have on duty. That is calculated by an
"empty" cell in a column (or row) of data entries.

Suppose the "V, H, S or something" is in the cells A2:A100 for each of
99 people. Then the following would count the number of empty cells
(and cells that contain ""):

=countblank(A2:A100)

PS: I want to reiterate that I think it is prudent to count cells
that contain "", not just "empty" cells (cells with no formula and no
value). if it is very common to have logic like: =if(condition, "",
value).