Today, we want to count how many times we sold apples, pears and oranges. We are going to use a small table to check our results, because with a bigger table it isn’t going to be easy. We will use the COUNTIF function. This function has got only two arguments. The first one is a range, where we will be checking our conditions or criteria. In our case, the criterion is the name of our product, so we are selecting the cell with the product name. Such a function will check each cell in the range, whether it contains the name or not.
=COUNTIF(B2:B10,F2)
If a cell contains the name, the function will add 1 to the counter. We can see that there are four 1s.
We also have to lock the range by pressing the F4 key, so that it stays in the same place. Criteria, however, should not be locked because we want them to change while copying the formula down, i.e. we want a given product to change.
=COUNTIF($B$2:$B$10,F2)
After entering and copying down, we have our results. We can see that apples have been sold four times, pears three times and oranges two times. It will also work with bigger tables. All we need to do is to write a bigger range.
=COUNTIF($B$2:$B$10,F2)
