MS Office 2010: Need help with CountIfs function, multiple ranges and a date as criteria

I need to count how many times a specific date occurs in multiple ranges.

I have multiple columns with dates, nine per year to be exact. There are however columns with other values inbetween.

Each year has columns for:

Interim - Declared (Col C - Date)
Interim - LDT (Col D - Date)
Interim - Payment (Col E - Date)
Interim - Amount (Col F - Number)
Final - Declared (Col G - Date)
Final - LDT (Col H - Date)
Final - Payment (Col I - Date)
Final - Amount (Col J - Number)
Special - Declared (Col K - Date)
Special - LDT (Col L - Date)
Special - Payment (Col M - Date)
Special - Amount (Col N - Number)

I need to count how many times a specific date occurs in the LDT columns only.

How do I enter the criteria for a date?

While trying to figure out the CountIfs function syntax I used the numeric values columns:
Entering CountIfs(F5:F120,95) answer is 3
Entering CountIfs(F5:F120,95,J5:J120,95) answer is 0 when it should at least be 3???

If it doesn't work with one year how is it going to work with multiple years?

What an I doing wrong? How do I do this?

can we see a sample spreadsheet

your date appears to be in a lot of different columns -which is going to make this a little difficult

CountIfs(F5:F120,95,J5:J120,95)
Thats an AND statement

so as an example if in F5 you have 95 , then to count J5 will also need to have 95 in

so look at the three results you had for just the F column and make sure in the same row J also has 95 - if it does then the formula is not working correctly - but if J does not have 95 for those 3 rows in F - then 0 will be the result

I need an OR statement. An AND statement is not going to work for me.

I need to know if a specific date is in any one of the cells in the specific ranges supplied.

Any ideas?

use countif

CountIf(F5:F120,95)+CountIf(J5:J120,95)

so that will count all the F's and all the J's

But do you want to count as 2 if the same row for J and F have 95

not really sure what you are trying to do here with the 95

i must be missing the format - can you load a sample spreadsheet

It's a huge spreadsheet.

Eventually I'm going to do this from VBA. All I want to know is if the specific date does occur in any one of the columns. If it does occur once (or more) then I loop through the columns to find the specific date and then do the calculations I need to do.

I'm trying to avoid looping through the huge table and not finding the date. Previously I used the CountIf function and supplied the whole range as one range and it returned how many times a date occurred. If this was one or more times then I go and find them and work with them. Unfortunately they added several date columns so I can't pass the whole range as one range anymore. The other columns might have the date in but it's not applicable to my needed columns.