Find string other than specified strings

[melknothink]

Currently I have cells containing an assortment of activities. Some cells contain one such as Workshops others contain multiple values Workshops, Mentors, Funding...

Currently I am counting cells that contain each activity with =COUNTIF(A1, "*Workshops*") and I have this for each activity. The problem is I want to find cells that contain values other than any of my specified values.

I want to have an extra column that will count A1 if it contains anything other than Workshops, Mentors, Funding etc

Thanks

[Tony Valko]

Can you post a SMALL sample file and tell us what result(s) you expect?

[melknothink]

Hey Tony,

Thanks for the quick response.

Attached is an example file. The highlighted column is the column I need help with.

[Tony Valko]

I think you're going to need a VBA UDF (user defined function) to do what you want.

If the search strings were always EXACT matches then you might be able to use a formula of built-in functions.

For example, one of the activities is Mentors but in column B it is entered as Mentor. In a formula it would be too difficult to try to account for every variation of a word. A VBA UDF would be better suited to do this.

Unfortunately, I'm not much of a programmer so someone else will need to help you with that.