If you want to know the count by name by letter grade, it seems like you
would need a row for each name and a column for each letter grade.

Countif is much faster than an array formula.

You might want to use a pivot table on a separate page.

Regards,
Tom Ogilvy

"Cam" wrote in message
m...
. w x y z | a | b | c |
|---|---|---|
name 1 a a b c | 2 | 1 | 1 |
name 2 b a b | 1 | 2 | |
name 3 c a a a | 3 | | 1 |
name 4 b a b c | a | 2 | 1 |

Let's say w, x, y, z are dates, and a letter grade is given for tests
taken by students on those dates. Is there a more efficient method of
calculating how many of each letter grade each student has than what I
already have?

I'm using... =IF(COUNTIF(C3:f3,"a")=0,"",COUNTIF(C3:f3,"a")) [entered
in the "a" column, for example]. I already validate the entries for
the proper letters so that's okay.

It's not fancy but it works. It just doen't "look" too clean having
about 100 rows of names and 5 columns of letters.

Was wondering if there was a way to call a function or method to
calculate the counts or maybe just to clean up the formula a bit. Use
of Array?

Thanks