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The CountIf function is a conditional formula, like the If function. CountIf is used when you only want to count cells in a row or column that will satisfy a particular condition.

For example, a spreadsheet that shows how many members of staff are absent on each day of the month. You may need to know on how many days there were no absenses. The CountIf function is the perfect solution for this problem. This is the official microsoft definition of the CountIf function:

=COUNTIF(range,criteria)

So, from the example, what we are looking for is all the cells in a range where "0" occures. If the values are in the range A1 to A31, our function would look like this:

=COUNTIF(A1:A31, "0")

This basically says count all the cells in this range only if data in the cells equals 0. The criteria doesn't have to be numerical, you can also use words or phrases.

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