Countif: others?

[ansar]

Hi: I'm reasonably new to Excel, and have a fairly basic question to check out:
I have been using the COUNTIF function to count up numbers of items in various categories in a column.
The formulae I have been using are like this:
=COUNTIF(F$3:F$201, "Red")

or where I've wanted to combine various comments
=SUM(COUNTIF(F$3:F$201,"Yellow")+COUNTIF(F$3:F$201,"Cream"))

I'm not sure what formulae to use to count up
1) the total number of entries in that column, so that I can make sure that I haven't missed some (without having to check manually!)

2) how to count up the values that do not match the other categories that I have specified in the COUNTIFs: this would be a value for finding how many 'other' entries there are in that column, without having to specify those values