cheal2,

A few flaws with that formula:
It doesn't used the named range, and it checks each cell individually. If his named range friends contains 10, or 20, or more cells, that is a lot of manual typing the formula and it will not scale well.
FIND is case sensitive, so in his list, the names have the first letter capitalized but the the sentences are all lower case, so the FIND function will not find them. This can be gotten around either by coupling the FIND function with the LOWER (or UPPER) function, or by using the SEARCH function instead (SEARCH does the same thing as FIND, but it is not case sensitive).
Lastly, if a name appears in a sentence more than once, it will still only be counted once, which would yield incorrect results given the fourth example sentence where "brad" appears twice.