We sell a relatively small number of large products, delivered to clients over years.

I want to count which products were delivered in which month. To keep things simple, I have two columns:
  • Column A contains the product ID
  • column B contains the date of delivery to client

I want to create a table with the count of the products delivered per month: 
Jan Feb Mar Apr
 2   4   3   7
And so forth.

I thought I could achieve this by duplicating the date column, changing the format to just show the month and year, then doing =countif(delivery_month,"Sep-2006"), but this returns a zero value, presumably because Excel sees the date as a number, not a lump of text.

What's the better way to go about this?

Thanks,

GDI