I'm analyzing some survey data in which the responses are in the form of a string containing inequalities, e.g.
a) < 5
b) 5-10
c) 11-15
d) > 15
I'm attempting to tabulate responses using the Countifs
function, and Excel does not appear to parse the value of the cell with the criteria argument as a string, and so returns 'False' for those bins; it does not evaluate a cell containing the string '< 5' as being equal to another cell containing '< 5', or the literal argument "< 5".
A comparison of the reference cells in other formulas, using =
or EXACT()
returns TRUE
.
I know the criteria argument of the conditional operators like COUNTIF()
, SUMIF()
, etc. use strings with inequalities when they're actually serving as operators, but I can't figure out how to suppress this and evaluate these cells as simple strings. Thanks so much!