What function should you use if you want to count the number of cells that meet a specific criterion?

The CountIf function is specifically designed for counting the number of cells within a range that meet a specified criterion. This function takes two arguments: the range of cells you want to evaluate and the condition you want to apply. For example, if you wanted to count how many times a certain value appears in a list, CountIf allows you to easily achieve that with a single formula.

Using CountIf is particularly beneficial when dealing with data sets where you need to filter based on certain conditions—such as counting only the cells with values above a certain threshold or cells that match a particular text string. This makes it an efficient tool for analyzing data.

In contrast, other functions serve different purposes: Count simply counts the number of cells that contain numeric values, CountA counts all non-empty cells regardless of contents, and SumIf adds up the values in a specified range that meet a specific criterion. Hence, for counting cells based on defined criteria, CountIf is the most appropriate choice.