Friday, March 2, 2012

yogi_Create A Workaround To Count The Number Of Cells Where Hyperlink Function Has Been Used

Yogi Anand, D.Eng, P.E.                Google Spreadsheet          Post  #453          www.energyefficientbuild.com

user DSMader said:
Using Countif to count instances of a formula
Is it possible to use COUNTIF to count the number of instances of a formula, rather than the output of that formula, within a cell range?
Here's my situation: Column A of my spreadsheet lists 308 items. Subsequent columns are used as "check-boxes" to indicate whether a given item meets a certain criterion. If an item meets a given criterion, I add a hyperlink to the item cell in column a using HYPERLINK, so that readers can click on the item to read the source supporting the proposition that the item meets the relevant criterion.
Only a subset of the 308 items meet the relevant criteria and therefore have hyperlinks. I'd like to use COUNTIF to automatically count the number of items that meet the relevant criteria, and automatically add additional items.
I've tried the formula =COUNTIF(A2:A309, HYPERLINK) but get a range name error on 'hyperlink'; I've also tried =COUNTIF(A2:A309, "hyperlink") and received a 0 value - presumably because the word "hyperlink" does not appear in the output text in any of the cells in the range.
So: is there a way to have a formula be the criterion in the COUNTIF function?
Thanks!
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following is a proposed workaround solution to the problem

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