Trying to count the occurrence of the first letter of a string in a column...

JWood

I have a "Serial" column which can have two types of serial formats. One type starts with "S" as in "S1234" and the other is "R" as in "R1234".

I need to count the number of serial numbers starting with "R" so I can then count the number of them past-due in another column.

I started with =countif(Serial:Serial, "R****"), but that just returned a 0.

Advice please

Paul Newcome

Try something like this:

=COUNTIFS(Serial:Serial, LEFT(@cell) = "R")