Loop counting and highlighting cells that are less than

I have been asked to go through an extensive excel worksheet and count which dates are before a certain day and give my supervisor a total. There are thousands of dates. I know I can have excel do this for me I just don't remember how. I would like some help with the most basic VBA commands to do this. The values are in column K and each value has two blank rows under it before the next value. If I wanted to write script to go through the column and any value that is less than 20111230 in column K put a red X in the cell in the next column how would I go about doing it? Also, if I could have a counter so that I don't then have to go through and count the X's. I was thinking making a command button then at the end of the script having a msg box show up with the total dates less than the above date. This is an small example what the dates look like. I coule really use some help on this one.

20111002


20111203


20120523


20120523


20071104

To get a simple count, you should use the COUNTIF() function already in Excel. If you don't remember how to use it, type in a quick google search on how. But pretty much you just enter the range of data you're looking at, I'm guessing an entire column in this case; what criteria it must meet, < 20111230 i'm guessing; etc.

To Put the Red X in the Cell would be a little more tricky, but not that bad. If you posted a beginning file with a couple lines of code, as well as the result file with a few lines of code I could write one up pretty quickly.

edit:
Do you need the red x's? If not COUNTIF() should be the only thing you need, and will be WAYYY faster than running your typical macro

ok, I would use a small macro then just to calculate that number of blank rows your countif() will find. something along the lines of this

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This way you still have a small code, but can let the countif() function do its job


edit: pete's is good lol

@ cnash52,

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