COUNTIF formula query

F

Fiona O'Grady

Hi,

I have a column of approx 200 text strings that were originally taken from a
html page. I'm trying to determine how many of these strings are in bold
format. I thought the easiest way would be to do a countif on the <b> tag
to see how many times it appears.

My data is in a1:a199, so in a202 I put in the formula
=COUNTIF(A1:A199,"<b>")
- however this returns the result 199, which is incorrect. Using Find from
the tools option, the result should be 62. Can anyone tell me if it's
possible to use COUNTIF to check if a cell *contains* a certain value, as
opposed to is equal to a certain value? And just out of curiousity, anyone
know why I'm getting the result 199 when not all cells contain the string
"<b>"? If I change the match expression to "/b" then the result is 0, so
I'm assuming that Excel is reading the < and > as greater than or less than.

Thanks in advance,
Fiona
 
F

Fiona O'Grady

Thanks Ron,

I had tried *"<b>"*, which obviously didn't work. However this raises
another question (though not a very important one) - I would always assume
that anything appearing within quotes would be searched for exactly. Does
this mean that if you're searching for the character *, that it will always
be read as a wildcard? So if I had been searching for the number of cells
that contain *, the result would be all cells?

Thanks again,
Fiona
 
A

Aladin Akyurek

CountIf appears to pick up all occurrences of <, the less than sign.

Try...

=SUMPRODUCT(--(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("<b>",A2:A9))))

instead.
 
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