a date to excel is a serial number, FORMATTED as a date. You can try
something like this:
=SUMPRODUCT(N(YEAR(A1:A100)=2001),N(YEAR(A1:A100) <=2010))
to count the number of values which fall between 2001 and 2010, but a value
of 39868, for example, will be counted, since that's the serial# for today.
HTH - Bob Umlas - Excel MVP

"Caroline" wrote in message
...
Hello,
I would like to count cells in a column that have dates in them -any date,
I
do not want to count cells with text or anything that's not a date.
I'm trying to use a countif, but I don't know how to write the criteria of
a
date.
Thank you,
Caroline