The COUNTIFS function has been around for many versions.

COUNTIFS offers the ability to perform single or multiple criteria counting. Including using wildcards like * and ? in the criteria to represent unknown characters.

It offers different techniques to determine important results like

  • Counting positives or negatives

  • Determining if a list contains duplicates

  • Identifying the first or last occurrence of an entry in a list

  • Comparing two lists

  • Validating an in-cell drop-down list selection

  • Summarising many validations

  • Creating flexible conditional formats

  • Applying filters based on multiple columns

As always, I will share a few general tips along the way.