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 Only Money Winners.
Chuck has a worksheet with prize monies to be awarded to the eighty players in his golf league. Each row represents a player, and each column represents the winners of each of the five tournaments held in the season. The sixth column contains a simple formula summing the winnings shown on each row. At the bottom of this sixth column Chuck wants to enter a function that would count the number of players actually receiving monetary awards.
There are several ways you can put together such a formula. You might be tempted to use the COUNTA function, but it won't work. The purpose of COUNTA is to count all the cells that are not empty. This means it will also count cells containing a zero value; they are not empty either.
You could use the SUMPRODUCT function in the following manner:
=SUMPRODUCT((G1:G80>0)*1)
This formula just checks if a cell is greater than zero. If it is, then the True value is multiplied by 1 resulting in a value of 1. If it is False, then the False value multiplied by 1 is 0. The sum of all these values (1 and 0) is then calculated, resulting in a count as desired.
Perhaps the easiest approach, however, is to use the COUNTIF function. This function performs a count only if a particular criteria is met:
=COUNTIF(G1:G80,">0")
In this case, the count only occurs if a cell is greater than zero.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2421) 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 Only Money Winners.
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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: 
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