I have a list of cells with text. I want to count how many times each
unique text cell appears. However, countif is having trouble
accurately distinguishing between unique cells

Ex:
ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN??
ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VANIL

If I were to ask it how many times ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN?? appeared
in this range of two cells, it would tell me 2, although the correct
answer is obviously 1. Is there a character limit for countif? Why is
it missing this simply calculation?


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kytihu
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If you are trying to match a literal question mark (which is a wildcard
for any single character) you need to prepend a tilde (~) to it.

=COUNTIF(E7:E8,"ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN~?~?")

Otherwise, without the tildes,
=COUNTIF(E7:E8,"ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN??")
will match on ALLSTATE INSURANCE CO.VAN followed by any 2 characters.


Does that help?

Regards,
Ron


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Ron Coderre
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That's exactly it. It was reading the ?? as "any 2 letters" i guess.

Thanks!


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kytihu
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