Counting Only Money Winners

Chuck has a worksheet with prize monies to be awarded to the eighty players in his golf league. Each row represents a player, and each column represents the winners of each of the five tournaments held in the season. The sixth column contains a simple formula summing the winnings shown on each row. At the bottom of this sixth column Chuck wants to enter a function that would count the number of players actually receiving monetary awards.

There are several ways you can put together such a formula. You might be tempted to use the COUNTA function, but it won't work. The purpose of COUNTA is to count all the cells that are not empty. This means it will also count cells containing a zero value; they are not empty either.

You could use the SUMPRODUCT function in the following manner:

=SUMPRODUCT((G1:G80>0)*1)

This formula just checks if a cell is greater than zero. If it is, then the True value is multiplied by 1 resulting in a value of 1. If it is False, then the False value multiplied by 1 is 0. The sum of all these values (1 and 0) is then calculated, resulting in a count as desired.

Perhaps the easiest approach, however, is to use the COUNTIF function. This function performs a count only if a particular criteria is met:

=COUNTIF(G1:G80,">0")

In this case, the count only occurs if a cell is greater than zero.