I need to find a way to notify myself if someone's name appears 5 times in a column

Diego Casillas Zaragoza

I have tried a number of ways with countifs, countif, match and others. I can't get it to work. Help would be greatly appreciated

Nic Larsen

You can try this one:

=COUNTIFS(Offender:Offender, FIND(Offender@row, @cell) > 5)

You can also change the "> 5" to "> 0" and it will count how many times the name populates in the column depending on what your needs are.

Diego Casillas Zaragoza

To be quite frank, I do am extremely naïve to this so I don't understand that @row or @cell means.

Nic Larsen

No problem. There's lots of great articles on how to use those functions but they can be very useful.

Basically, its scanning your column "Offender" and searching for the name of the Offender to the left, assuming you are inputting this formula in the # of Offenses column.

So it scan down the entire column, looking at each cell '@cell', to match the name and then counting it. You can either set it to 0 to count every time it finds the name in the cell in that column or you can set it to 5 and it will tell you how many times it sees it more than 5 times.

@row takes the place of needing to assign a cell number, such as Offender10.

Hope this helps.

Nic Larsen

Here's a good article: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2476491-create-efficient-formulas-with-at-cell

Diego Casillas Zaragoza

Nic Larsen, =COUNTIFS(Offender:Offender, FIND(Offender@row, @cell) > 0) this worked fantastically! thank you so much. Now, how do I make it to where the blank cells in Offender are not counted?

Andrée Starå

Hi @Diego Casillas Zaragoza

Try something like this.

=COUNTIFS(Offender:Offender; FIND(Offender@row; @cell) > 0; Offender:Offender; <>"")

Did that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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