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View Full Version : How many characters can countif handle?



NukedWhale
01-13-2009, 04:43 PM
I think I've reached the character limit that excel can handle. Both in the size of the string I'm looking for and the size of the strings I'm looking within.

What are the limits?

Any workarounds?

chungtinhlak
01-13-2009, 05:54 PM
xld just help me with this last week. :)

you can use find but find is case sensitive.

you can also use search, search is case insensitive.

NukedWhale
01-14-2009, 08:26 AM
Maybe I'm approaching the problem incorrectly.

I have a worksheet with lots of shopping basket data.

Rows are unique transactions and I have 4 columns that identify which (up to 4) products they purchased. Products are identified by unique product codes.

I wanted to find out how many times each combination of product occurred. I thought I would concatenate the 4 product codes and then run a countif against the concatenated codes. Unfortunately, I appear to have exceeded countif's limits.

Any other possible approaches?

georgiboy
01-14-2009, 08:47 AM
How long is your concatenated string?

I believe the limit is 255. Someone correct me if im wrong.

NukedWhale
01-14-2009, 10:34 AM
At most 60 numbers

georgiboy
01-14-2009, 01:23 PM
Works for me on strings of 200+ see below...