Chip Pearson has these custom functions that return the color. Instead of
sorting you can use a SUMPRODUCT to count the colors by person.

http://cpearson.com/excel/SortByColor.htm

If you're not familiar with using SUMPRODUCT to count the items, I recommend
you get those functions working first and then do a google search to get
that formula. (It is posted on this newsgroup a least once a day (A search
for "counting with multiple criteria" should return the syntaxt)

PC

"umaanddottie" wrote in message
...
I am trying to count cells that have a specific field color, such as green
or
yellow. I'm scheduling emergency duty and need to make sure that the
awful
shifts (Friday nights and Saturday nights) get distributed evenly among
the
30 interns/residents doing duty. I have the shift rows highlighted across
the list of names to be schedules. I've used the COUNTIF function to
count
occurances of things, but it only accepts words, numbers, etc. as
criteria.
Any ideas?