Count ifs formula

Drea Mora

Hello,

I'm using a smartsheet to track contacts engaged in a multi-year project. I'm trying to count all the contacts engaged in year 1 AND 2 in a sheet summary report and can't figure out how to countifs for this sheet. My column is called "year Engaged" and my fields say either "grant cycle #1" or "grant cycle #2". This is what I have that keeps giving me an error message. What am I doing wrong>

COUNTIFS(YearEngaged:YearEngaged, "Grant Cycle #1, [YearEngaged:YearEngaged, "Grant Cycle #2"])

Paul Newcome

There are some syntax issues that are causing the error, but even fixing those I feel like we would need to tweak the approach. Give this a try.

COUNTIFS(YearEngaged:YearEngaged, OR(@cell = "Grant Cycle #1", @cell = "Grant Cycle #2"))

Paul Newcome

You need an = at the very beginning. all formulas need this to be able to function. Otherwise it comes out as plain text.

Paul Newcome

There are some syntax issues that are causing the error, but even fixing those I feel like we would need to tweak the approach. Give this a try.

COUNTIFS(YearEngaged:YearEngaged, OR(@cell = "Grant Cycle #1", @cell = "Grant Cycle #2"))

Drea Mora

@Paul Newcome Hmm now a very strange thing is happening, when i click enter it makes a new paragraph line and doesn't count the formula. I've saved and exited and came back and only shows the formula in the summary field not the number it's supposed to count. Do you know why this is happening?

Paul Newcome

You need an = at the very beginning. all formulas need this to be able to function. Otherwise it comes out as plain text.

Drea Mora

LOL what an embarrassing mistake! Thanks for catching this - works perfectly now!

Paul Newcome

Haha. No worries. Happy to help. 👍️

If it makes you feel any better, I get so used to creating formulas that I do the opposite. I need to enter plain data in a cell, start it off with an = and then end up with an error.