Count if a cell contains text in Excel

The same formula in Wisegrid

Wisegrid's formula engine ships COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, SUMIF, FIND, ISNUMBER, IF, LOWER, and SUM, and COUNTIF's wildcard matching now works exactly like Excel's: case-insensitive, and anchored to where the * sits in the pattern. The headline formula, which is the whole point of this page, runs unchanged in a shared Wisegrid grid:

=COUNTIF(A:A, "*invoice*")

Whole-column letter ranges like A:A work directly, and same-row references use the column name: [Task]@row. Two things that used to differ from Excel now match it exactly, and one real gap remains:

• Case: "*invoice*" and "*Invoice*" return the same count (verified against the shipped engine) - Wisegrid's COUNTIF ignores case, same as Excel. The LOWER + FIND helper column below still works; it is just no longer required for a case-insensitive count.
• Anchoring: "invoice*" counts only cells that start with "invoice", "*invoice" only cells that end with it, and "*invoice*" counts cells that contain it anywhere - the same three patterns, anchored the same way, as Excel (verified against the shipped engine). ? still matches exactly one character. The LEFT/RIGHT helper-column pattern below still works too, for the same reason: no longer required, still useful.
• SUMPRODUCT and @cell are not in Wisegrid's supported set, so the array-style one-liner still does not port, and the ~ escape for a literal * or ? is not implemented in Wisegrid's COUNTIF - do not rely on "~*" to search for a literal asterisk. The Wisegrid equivalent for the SUMPRODUCT case is a helper column plus SUM, which also reads more plainly in a shared grid:

Same task list, testing the anchors directly - each pattern below differs from the headline formula by one wildcard:
=COUNTIF(A:A, "invoice*")
=COUNTIF(A:A, "*invoice")

Against Send invoice to Apple and Design review, both anchored patterns return 0: neither task literally starts or ends with "invoice", so only the contains pattern this page opened with matches. That is the anchoring working as advertised, and it is also why the helper-column patterns below are no longer required for a correct count, only still useful: COUNTIF now does the case-insensitive, anchored matching natively. A helper column still earns its keep when you want the match visible as its own grid column, and Wisegrid also ships Smartsheet's CONTAINS(text, value) (still case-sensitive, unaffected by this fix), so Smartsheet-style formulas keep working after an import.

The helper-column pattern below runs the same strict starts-with or ends-with count with LEFT or RIGHT, if you would rather see the check as its own column than as a bare COUNTIF:

Starts-with helper column, as a column formula:
=IF(LEFT([Order Id]@row, 3) = "INV", 1, 0)

Ends-with helper, same pattern with RIGHT:
=IF(RIGHT([Order Id]@row, 5) = "00482", 1, 0)

The count, either way:
=SUM([Helper]:[Helper])

Worked example: with INV-00482 and INV-00483 in the Order Id column, the starts-with helper marks both rows 1 (both begin INV), so SUM returns 2; the ends-with helper marks only the row ending 00482, so SUM returns 1. The native anchored wildcards agree: =COUNTIF(C:C, "INV*") also returns 2, and =COUNTIF(C:C, "*00482") also returns 1 (Order Id is column C in this example).

Verified against the shipped engine: the case-insensitive contains wildcard, the anchored starts-with/ends-with wildcards, the LOWER/FIND helper, the LEFT/RIGHT helper, and CONTAINS were each executed against the live 118-function engine before publishing.