How do you count if a cell contains partial text in Excel

Question

Essentially, I am having trouble finding the formula to perform a countif in an array for text that partially comprises other cells in the array.

As an example, when searching for text "fire" in an array of "fire", "arcade fire", "firetruck", and "water", I'd want the formula to return a value of three. Have tried using countif and match to no avail.

Code I've tried includes: MATCH("FIRE",B1:B4,1) where B1:B4 are the above strings. COUNTIF("FIRE",B1:B4). =IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("FIRE",B1:B4)),1,0) (this function is not ideal as it would not be counting).

Answer 1

With Formulas, Countif Partial String/Substring Match
We can use the COUNTIF function in Excel to count cells by placing an asterisk before and after a partial string or substring.

Select a blank cell to store the counting result, write the formula =COUNTIF(A1:A16,"*Anne*") into it, and press the Enter key (A1:A16 is the range to count cells, and Anne is the partial string).

The total number of cells containing the partial string is then calculated. Take a look at this example:

Note: You can use the formula =COUNTIFS(A1:A16,"*Anne*",A1:A16,"*Green*") to count cells that include both substrings. (The range you'll be counting cells is A1:A16, and Anne and Green are both partial strings.)