Counting cells in B based on text in column A

Hello,

I have a 2 column Excel sheet: Column A contains a random assortment of months (January - December). Column B contains various names (see attachment).

I would like a cell in a separate workbook to give me the total cells in column B that have January in column A. However, there may be duplicates, which I do not want (There could be multiple rows that have January in column A & Sarah in column B, but they should only count as 1).

So far I've been able to use COUNTIF to count how many cells are in a column, minus the duplicates: =SUM(1/COUNTIF(Range1,Range1))
I've also been able to use COUNTIFS to get a sum of how many cells contain a specific string of text:=COUNTIFS(Range2,"criteria2")

I think I need to combine these 2 in some way, but I can't quite figure out how to do it.

Can anyone help me out here? I'd really appreciate it!

Thanks =]

Jackie

Thanks for the quick responses! I'm having some issues though.

Ace_XL -- Your formula tells me how many names I have, minus the duplicates (6), but I'm looking for how many names have January next to them, minus duplicates, so the number displayed should be 1. Are we on the same page here?

Tony -- Your formula seems to work well. However, I have to apply this concept to a much larger, more complex book of data, so I'd like to know exactly how it works. If you have time, would you mind explaining what the formula does step by step?

Thanks again to both of you!

Thanks a lot, Tony! That explanation was very helpful--one last area I'm confused about though:

I assumed that if you were to add additional columns you could just add an AND statement to your above formula. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. For instance, if I add a new column B to the left of our Names column, let's say a column of random numbers, and now we were looking for the unique number of rows that have January in column A, the number 2 in column B, and Sarah in column C, I thought this formula would work: =SUM(IF(FREQUENCY(IF(AND(A2:A8=D2,B2:B8=D3),MATCH(C2:C8,C2:C8,0)),ROW(C2:C8)-ROW(C2)+1),1)), where we've set D3 equal to 2.

However, I keep getting an #VALUE! error. Can you explain why?

Ah, so simple! Thanks again, Tony!