In excel, how do I tally the number of entries that match my search term in a single column?

Question by Big Blair: In excel, how do I tally the number of entries that match my search term in a single column?
I am in the military and trying to make it easy to extract data from our personnel roster. I want to make a formula that looks through the first 180 entries in Column A and tells me how many have the following in it:
"E-5"
I plan to do this for all the miltary grades (E-1 through E-9, WO1-CW5, and O-1 through O-10).
In the end, if there are 20 entries of E-5 in the first column, I want the result to read "20".
I tried setting it up with the =COUNTA forumula, but it seems to count every cell that has text in it. Am I formatting it wrong, or is there another command?
Here is the format I used:
=COUNTA (A1:A180,E-5)
Thanks in advance for your help.


Best answer:
Answer by lilyapplecheeksIntriguing question. I've done something similar in the past so I'll tell you what I did, but I'm going to watch your question to see if anyone else has something better.

On a

mystery pua