A colleague came to me yesterday and complained about the length of formulas.
She needs to count occurrences of values in a table that meet any of several
criteria. The table is pure text with no blanks. Her formula was something
like:

=COUNTIF(G7:G3147,"open")+COUNTIF(G7:G3147,"pendin g
review")+COUNTIF(G7:G3147,"review complete")+COUNTIF(G7:G3147,"assigned")

I pointed out that she did not need repeated COUNTIF()s and to use:

=SUM(COUNTIF(G7:G3147,{"open","pending review","review complete","assigned"}))

She was satisfied, but returned this morning and wanted to know if the
criteria could be completely removed from the formula and stored in a table.

I put the match values in Z1 thru Z4 and tried:

=SUM(COUNTIF(G7:G3147,Z1:Z4)) but this returns zero.

Any suggestions for putting the criteria in a little table and referring to
that table??

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Gary''s Student - gsnu200858