Oh boy... sometimes the answers are so simple! Although I think I must be having trouble with the date format. The spreadsheet is downloaded with tons of data from another source and dumped into excel. I didn't think that should make a difference, but for somereason I can't get the countif to work. I should be able to reference a cell, but it is not working. For example if I enter =countif(R9:R200,">R2") where R2 has a date (eg. 1-FEB-13) it should count all the cells whose datevalue is greater than 1-feb-13. However, I can only get it to work if I enter =countif(R9:R200,">41306") where 41306 is the value of Feb 1. Any ideas on that?? It's weird because I've not had that trouble in other spreadsheets.