If the person's name is Robert or Ruth, you would end up with an inaccurate result.
Perhaps it would be better to leave the name unchanged and have a "status" indicator in another cell to show past or present membership of the department. This should make life easier for reporting, filtering, sorting etc.
Loading
ExcelTips (Menu Interface)
Members
This Site
Got a version of Excel that uses the menu interface (Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, or Excel 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.
Author Bio
With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company.
Learn more about Allen...
Helpful Links
ExcelTips FAQ
Ask an Excel Question
Make a Comment
Free Business Forms
Free Calendars
Subscribe
Counting Cells with Specific Characters
Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Counting Cells with Specific Characters.
Let's say that you have a worksheet that contains all the people who have ever worked in your department. Each name is prefaced by a single character that indicates the status of the person. For instance, if Fred Davis were retired, his name might show up as "RFred Davis". With quite a lot of these names in the worksheet, you may need a way to count those people with a specific status character.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to use the COUNTIF function. If, for instance, the status character is the letter R (for "retired"), and your range of names is in cells A5:A52, then you could use the following to determine which cells begin with the letter R:
=COUNTIF(A5:A52,"R*")
The formula works because the comparison value is R*, which means "the letter R followed by any other characters." Excel dutifully returns the count. To search for a different status character, simply replace R with the desired status character.
Obviously, if the asterisk has a special meaning in this usage, you can't search directly for an asterisk. Actually, there are three characters you cannot search for directly: the asterisk (*), the question mark (?) and the tilde (~). If you want to search for any of these characters, you must precede the character with the tilde. Thus, if you wanted to determine a count of names that had a question mark as a status code, you could use the following:
=COUNTIF(A5:A52,"~?*")
An alternative to using COUNTIF is to create an array formula that is applied to every cell in the range. The following will do the trick very nicely:
=SUM((LEFT(A5:A52,1)="R")*1)
This must, of course, be entered as an array formula. This means that instead of pressing Enter at the end of the formula, you would press Shift+Ctrl+Enter. The formula checks the left-most character of a cell, returning the value TRUE if it is R or FALSE if it is not. The multiplication is done to convert the TRUE/FALSE value to a number, either 1 for TRUE or 0 for FALSE. The SUM function returns the sum, or count, of all the cells that meet the criteria.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2342) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Counting Cells with Specific Characters.
Related Tips:
Organize Your Data! Using the powerful sorting capabilities of Excel can help you get your data into just the order you need. Find out how you can use the full capabilities of sorting to your benefit. Check out ExcelTips: Serious Sorting today!
Comments for this tip:
Dave Kerr 02 Dec 2013, 07:35