Good day, Jay

I'm not sure, what you are after. Is it *words* ( can exist at 3 places:
at the start of the string, inside the string and at the end of the string)
At the start, it's the characters followed by a space, inside the string
it's a space followed by the characters followed by a space, and at the
end it's a space followed by the characters.
OR
Are you looking for the *characters* no matter where they pop up (inside
another word)?

You say *words*, but your formula indicates *characters*, so here is a
solution for either:

For *words*, assuming the word to count for is entered in F1

=SUMPRODUCT((LEN(" " &A1:A10&" ")-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(" "&A1:A10&" "," "&F1&"
","")))/(LEN(F1)+2))

for *characters* (again entered in F1)

=SUMPRODUCT((LEN(A1:A10)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1:A10,F1,"")))/LEN(F1))

--
Best Regards
Leo Heuser
Excel MVP

Followup to newsgroup only please.

"JayL." skrev i en meddelelse
news:r9kob.64804$Fm2.52722@attbi_s04...
Good day,

I have a sheet with numerous text strings all in the same column. I need
to
search each and return the number of occurances (total) of the words
"medicare" and "eomb" cointained in each string.
I've tried this function:

=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"*medicare*")+COUNTIF(A1:A10,"*eom b*")
but it only counts 1 occurance of each. I need to the total times the word
'medicare occurs plus the total times 'eomb' occurs.

Any suggestions?