How to count the cells that match multiple criteria in Excel

Matching is the process or the act of comparing two or more items with similar characteristics. If the two items or objects happen to match, we call that a match. Data values in the excel sheet may also appear to match in that the values in the rows match those in the columns.

The act of tallying a certain quantity to obtain or to reveal the number of items or several objects in a set is what we mostly refer to as counting. Counting is general and done in almost all aspects of life or our daily routines.

When we talk of cells that multiple criteria we refer to the cells that either meet a certain condition, for example, we can obtain a count of cells that have values less than 100 from a list or the number of cells with values between 200 and 500.

To count the cells with such multiple criteria we have to follow the following steps that are done and explained in full detail.

Step 1

Open a blank excel sheet or new excel and record some data into it. If you already have the excel sheet ready with the dataset, move on to the next step. The data set you have in place should contain values that you can easily obtain multiple criteria. Consider the example below.

Step 2

From the above scenario, we are going to obtain the tally of the cells that have multiple criteria from the list. To do this we are going to use the function COUNTIF. 

This excel function does output or does the tally when a certain condition is met. The conditions can be many depending on the type of scenario you are dealing with. The formula that we will write on the formula bar or the result cell E1 will be =COUNTIF ($B$2: $B$7,">20")-COUNTIF ($B$2:$B$7,">45"). 

The formula will use the greater than and the less than values so that it will help to get the correct criteria and the COUNTIF function will output the correct count of the cells in that criteria.